Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Post History

#1: Initial revision by user avatar Derek Elkins‭ · 2020-11-11T00:54:46Z (almost 4 years ago)
The quotes from the books are *exactly* the kind of ridiculously naive and over-simplified linguistics in introductions to logic that I criticize [in this blog article](https://www.hedonisticlearning.com/posts/the-pedagogy-of-logic-a-rant.html#silly-linguistics). Particularly for everyday natural language expressions, you will find no shortage of ways where this "translation" provides only a clumsy interpretation, is inadequate, is outright wrong, or is just nonsensical. This also has nothing to do with how mathematicians/logicians use formal logic.

Even then, your question is strange. There's no reason to expect every definition of "unless" to be even clumsily equivalent to this "translation". There's also no reason to expect the etymology of "unless" or this obsolete form have anything at all to do with this logical interpretation. This is almost certainly not the form of "unless" the authors of these books were intending, especially as the given example doesn't use "than" or "that".

Either you're asking how the natural language meaning of "if not" relates to this obsolete form of "unless", in which case this is not a mathematics question; or you're unreasonably asking how this "translation" corresponds to a meaning of "unless" that is clearly not the meaning the authors intended. It would be like asking why "not" is "translated" to logical negation but under the condition that "not" is defined as "nothing" because "not" (allegedly) derives from "nought" which means (among other definitions) "nothing".