Re: [bpfk] Uniqueness across quantification.

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 8:51 PM, Robin Lee Powell
<rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
>
> In {ci remna cu xabju pa zdani}, we have 3 houses total, one for
> each person, due to distributivity.

No, we have no idea how many houses we have. All we are told is that
three humans live in one house, we are not told how many humans live
in more than one house, how many live in no house at all, or how many
houses are uninhabited.

A useful check for this kind of statement is to consider its
da'a-equivalent. The statement is equivalent to:

  da'a ci remna cu xabju vei me'i pa .a za'u pa ve'o zdani
  All but three humans live in less than one or more than one houses.

The two statements are logically equivalent. In the second form we are
less likely to confuse the quantifiers with determiners.

Of the three humans that we are told that live in exactly one house,
we are told nothing about whether they all share the same house,
whether two of them share a house and the other one lives alone or
with somebody else, or whether each of them lives in a different house
(alone or with other people).

> But as far as I can tell, the
> red book does not specificy if each of those houses is distinct;
> they could all be living in one house, or sharing 2, or one each,
> there's no way to tell.

Correct.

> Worse, there's no way to explicitely mark
> one case or the other.

As the numbers grow larger, the different possible combinations grow
exponentially, so it would not be practical to have some simple way to
mark each possible distribution. The extreme cases, where they all
share one house or where each lives in a different house are
relatively easy, but first of all you want to indicate that you are
talking about three humans and not just saying how many humans (out of
some unmentioned total you are talking about) live in only one house.

> 1.  Am I missing something?
>
> 2.  Is there a decent, short way to handle this rigorously?  {ro le
> ci zdani cu se xabju pa le ci remna .i je re le ci remna cu xabju pa
> le ci zdani} is the best I've found, and it's pretty shitty.
>
> 3.  If the answer to #2 is no, does this seem worthy of explicitely
> handling?  If so, what solution do you propose?

If what you want to say is that three humans share one house, you could say:

  lo ci remna cu kansi'u lo ka xabju lo (pa) zdani

If you want to say that they each live in a different house, I would suggest:

  ro lo ci remna cu xabju lo frica zdani

which is not logically rigorous, but it's clear enough. If you do need
logical rigour, I don't see any way other than multiple sentences.

> I note http://dag.github.com/cll/16/7/ for your consideration, as
> that seems the only relevant section.  I imagine {po'o} could be
> used here, perhaps with the termset trick shown there.

The termset trick has never been rigorously explained in a logically
sound way. Personally I think it's nonsense.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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