By now, the news of the bombing in Madrid is common. As in the first day or so after September 11th, the question of responsibility is open, and subject to considerable speculation.
Geoff Pullum, writing about a discussion on the BBC World Service, quotes a Prof. Halliday of the London School of Economics as saying "For a start they speak a language that no one can learn." This comes in reference to the Basques, an ethnic group living near the French/Spanish border. The language is famous for being wholly unrelated to anything in geographic proximity (or elsewhere, really) which would account for its origins. Prof. Pullum explodes the notion that "no one" who isn't a Basque can learn the language. But Prof. Halliday ought to have been vaguely embarrassed to even have originally put it like that.
SC assumes a logical form for the statement which is something like (using A for the logical "all" operator):
AxAy( (Person(y) & Is_Basque(y) & Speaks_Basque(y)) & (Person(x) & !(Speaks_Basque(x))) )
If we wanted to be really rigorous about it, we could add terms making explicit the relationship between speaking Basque and learning it, but SC will assume that anyone who speaks Basque managed to successfully learn it. Otherwise, I've tried to capture the part that Basques speak Basque with the first group of terms, and that "no one" speaks Basque with the second group. Regardless, assuming our variables range over the set of individuals, some x and y values will be identical -- i.e., Basques -- and the statement is a contradiction. Not that one really needs to have written that out in logical terms to have seen the problem.
It's not at all clear, though, that ETA, a Basque terrorist group, is responsible for the attack. Semioticians, the sort of people who are interested in figuring out why particular language items carry symbolic meaning (as opposed to semanticists, who worry about how), will be quick to note that today is the 11th of the month. And the evidence is somewhat mixed in regard to possible suspects. Investigations of this sort of thing ought to turn on real evidence, not the speculations of linguists, but it strikes SC as likely that whoever is responsible didn't pick the date accidentally.
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