Re: Nick tries valiantly to save face (His first sentence)

[cowan (John Cowan)]

Nick Nicholas and Arthur Hyun debate about my version of Arthur's sentence:

	dei pamoi le'i mi lojbo jufra

Given that the place structure of "pamoi" is "x1 is the first member of
set/list/group x2", why the "le'i"?  Doesn't the place structure encapsulate
the notion of "set", so that "le" is the appropriate article?

The first problem is an error of my own:  "le'i" should have been "lo'i".
The "lo-" articles differ from the "le-" articles in two ways: they are
veridical, and they implicitly include everything that meets the
description.

"le'i" is often translated "the set of", but it really means "the whole of
the set of the at-least-one-thing I describe as being".  So "le'i cribe"
means "the set of something(s) I call bears".  This is analogous to "le
cribe", which means "the something(s) I call a bear/bears."  "lo'i",
on the other hand, means "the whole of the set of all those things which
really are", so "lo'i cribe" means "the set of all bears".

Here we want to make a claim about "the set of all my Lojban sentences",
namely that "this-utterance" is the "first-of" them.  This is

	dei pamoi lo'i mi lojbo jufra
	This-utterance is-first-of the-whole-of-the-set-of-all-things-which-
	really-are Lojbanic-type-of sentences pertaining-to-me.


Now suppose I had written:

	dei pamoi lo mi lojbo jufra
	This-utterance is-first-of at-least-one-of-all-things-which-are
	Lojbanic-type-of sentences pertaining-to-me.

What would that claim?  It would mean that there is at least one of my
Lojban sentences of which this utterance is the first.  In other words,
this utterance is the first (the first what?) of some Lojbanic sentence of mine.

The use of "set" in a place structure is generally a signal that a set
sumti, either using "le'i" or "lo'i", or using "lu'i" to convert another
sumti to a set, or using "ce" or "ce'o" to combine two or more sumti into
a set, is appropriate in order to make sense.  Either that, or the
referent of the sumti should itself be a set, thus:

	dei pamoi lo mi lojbo jufra girzu
	This-utterance is-first-of at-least-one-of-all-those-things-which-are
	my Lojbanic-type-of-sentence sets.

-- 
cowan@snark.thyrsus.com		...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan
		e'osai ko sarji la lojban