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Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 12:50:44 -0700 (PDT)
From: John E Clifford <clifford-j@sbcglobal.net>
Subject: [lojban] Re: No default quantifiers.
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--- Robin Lee Powell
<rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 09:02:26AM -0700, Opi
> Lauma wrote:
> > Hello.
> > 
> > In the Lojban-Wiki I have found the
> following:
> > 
> > There are no default quantifiers. At all. For
> example, the default
> > outer quantifier of "lo" used to be "su'o",
> which means "at least
> > one", but that is no longer the case. "lo
> cribe" could be one, or
> > a billion, or none.
> > 
> > I do not understand what for the default
> quantifier {su'o} has
> > been removed. 
> 
> Because it made it very hard to say a lot of
> things that people
> thought they were saying, but actually weren't.
>  It also lead to a
> lot of very serious confusion when "na" was
> involved.

A good example of what was hard to say has, so
far as I can tell, never actually been offered,
though often claimed for bits that were not at
all hard to say with old {lo} (actually, the
intermediate {lo} that was the consensus between
CLL and xorlo). xorlo has some relatively tricky
{na} problems of its own, coming down to the
relative scope of explicit {na} and implicit
generalization -- to be resolved by context
again, alas (it does make it hard to pin someone
down if they can always say "But you misread the
context" when caught saying something absurd).

> > Now if I say {lo cribe cu danlu} I say
> nothing. Because this
> > expression is always true. 
> 
> {lo cribe cu danlu} is an extremely
> context-dependant sentence.
> This is a good thing most of the time.  If you
> want logical
> precision, use an explicit quantifier.