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To: Mark E. Shoulson <shoulson@sirius.ctr.columbia.edu>
Cc: lojban-list@snark.thyrsus.com
Subject: Re: "Could you please..." "Yes" 
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 12 Aug 91 17:16:12 EDT."
             <9108122116.AA06704@relay2.UU.NET> 
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 91 08:35:38 -0700
Status: RO
X-From-Space-Date: Tue Aug 13 12:29:51 1991
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Mark E. Shoulson <shoulson@sirius.ctr.columbia.edu> cusku di'e:
> ... However, if I
> use "lo" as the article, my predication includes a claim about the thing
> referred to there as well.  So "lo cukta cu blanu" would be false unless
> the thing referred to by "lo cukta" really was a book (and was blue, of
> course).
> Someone correct me if I misunderstood the veridicality of lo, please.

It is veridical but doesn't make a claim.  "veridical" means that the
referents really fit the s-selbri, and hence if the listener looks around
and fails to recognize any book, he is supposed to judge not that the
jufra is false, but that it is void, i.e. has zero referent set members.
(The jufra's referent set has zero members because the referent set of
one of its sumti has zero members.)

A clearer example is "all round squares are purple", which is obviously
true -- find me a counterexample!  We aren't used to handling void
assertions, which is why we bogusly slide into subordinate claims which
aren't there.  Now the situation would be different if the sentence
were "there exists X which is a round square; and X is purple"; use of
the existential quantifier separately claims that the quantified
referent set contains more than zero members.  

By the way, I think both of us are abusing "lo" in that the currently
official default quantification is "ro - all", so

	lo    kurfa   poi       cukla  cu   zirpu
	*all* squares which are round (are) purple

or in your example, "all books are blue", which is not likely.  An
alternative, accepted by the grammar and by Lojban Central, is:

	su'o           vi    cukta cu  blanu
	*at least one* local book (is) blue

With a bare digit the default article is "lo".  This construction gets
you what you wanted originally.  You need "vi" to avoid saying "among
all books in the whole universe, at least one is blue".  

		-- jimc