From jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU Sat Mar 6 22:45:01 2010 Date: Wed, 17 May 1995 10:02:29 EDT From: jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU Subject: Re: Quantifiers (was Re: A modest proposal #2: verdicality) To: Bob LeChevalier X-From-Space-Date: Wed May 17 13:49:32 1995 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@uga.cc.uga.edu Message-ID: > > LE > > A quantifier can go in front of most any sumti, not just one with a LE > or LA selma'o Yes, that's the above. The is a different beast, and can only go between LE (or LA, I suppose) and the selbri. > (anybody mind if I start calling these articles?), That's what they are. You can also call them gadri. > right? That's why I phrased it as above. (From the grammar, it > appears that you can't have a quantifier before a sumti joined with > connectives, but anywhere else will do.[1]) As long as you keep in mind that is not really a proper quantifier. > [1] Which leads me to ask: how would I say: "two of the man, the woman > and the child" (as a sumti)? "The man, the woman, and the child" is > le nanmu joi le ninmu joi le verba Unfortunately the {ku}s are unavoidable here. It has to be: le nanmu ku joi le ninmu ku joi le verba > How do I select two of them? re lu'a le nanmu ku joi le ninmu ku joi le verba > To me, {pa le re le ci ninmu} looks like a total bastard. If {re le ci > ninmu} is a sumti, what are you doing putting {le} in front of it? Well, there is a way of making some sense of it, if you make the distinction between quantifiers and enumerators. > I thought {le} was the form for converting a selbri to a sumti--what's > it doing twice here? It does have some uses. This construction permits things like {le re da}, for "the two things", very different from {re da}, "two things". > {le ci ninmu} is almost as bad. This one is extremely useful. It is the simplest way to say how many things you are refering to. > When I first saw it, I thought {ci > ninmu} was a unit--but no, this is really indecomposable. Consider: > to say "there are three men in the room" I can say > > .i lo ci nanmu ne'i le kumfa I suppose you mean: (1) i lo ci nanmu cu nenri le kumfa But that means: At least one of the three things that are men is inside the room. You are claiming that there are only three referents that are nanmu. To say that there are three men in the room, you'd have to say: (2) i ci lo nanmu cu nenri le kumfa Three of all those that are men are in this room. Or, in short form: (3) i ci nanmu cu nenri le kumfa The {ci} of (3) is the same {ci} of (2), where {lo} has been elided by convention. It is not the {ci} of (1), which has a different meaning. > as a sumti by itself; but to make a bridi, I need to rewrite this, in > one of the following ways: > le ni loi nanmu ne'i le kumfa du li ci That's a sumti: The amount of some men being equal to three inside the room. > or > loi nanmu ne'i le kumfa cu cimei That makes more sense: Some men are a threesome inside the room. (But other men may be doing something else there.) > or maybe > da noi te cimei nanmu ne'i le kumfa That's not a bridi. It's one sumti: Something which is a set-of-three type of man inside the room. > or > ci da nanmu ne'i le kumfa That's the best one: Three things are men in the room. > Umm. I'm not sure which of these mean what I want. In any case, my > point is that there's this syntax for implicitly making a claim about > the number of ways to fill in variables to make a sumti true, without > any corresponding syntax for filling in the places of a bridi. Why > can't > ci nanmu ne'i le kumfa > mean "There are men in the room (three of them)" or some such? I remember asking this very same question to John Cowan once, since the sumti {ci nanmu} can already be said {ci lo nanmu}, why not let {ci nanmu} be a selbri meaning "x1 is three men"? The answer is that for historical reasons it is what it is. > (Or maybe that should be > cimei nanmu ne'i le kumfa > and we should just use this tanru instead of the inside quantifiers. > Yes, I'm starting to like this.) That one is fine too. > > I've been studying the syntax of sumti. It is, to put it mildly, a > mess. Well, it has its things, but I wouldn't say it's a mess... You're being more of an iconoclast than I ever was! :) > Did you know {le mi do se cusku} is ungrammatical? Yes. Whatever would you want it to mean? > > BTW, strangely enough, {le pe fi le xunre ku plini} is grammatical, but > > with {be} instead of {pe} it isn't. > > What on earth is {le pe fi le xunre ku plini} supposed to mean? Pretty much what you meant by *{le fi le xunre ku plini}. In general, {LE } means the same as {le pe }, which in turn can also be written as {LE pe } > mu'o mi'e. dilyn. co'o mi'e xorxes