[lojban-beginners] Re: Q about general statements

[Michael Turniansky <mturniansky@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 8:35 PM, Robert Baruch
<autophile@zoominternet.net> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm totally n00b at Lojban. I'm hoping someone has some advice!
>
> I'd like to state that "Cities are in countries." I'm pretty sure this
> statement is logically meant to say that every particular instance of a city
> is a member of one and only one country.  Maybe I'm making a mountain out of
> a molehill and there's some easy way to say this, but here's my thought
> process:
>
> I've been puzzling through chapter 6 of the reference grammar. At first I
> started off with "loi tcadu cu cmima ??? gugde." but the description of
> "loi" says that this really means "some". The example shown is loi cinfo cu
> xabju le fi'ortu'a. = Lions dwell in Africa, but then it goes on to say that
> this statement says nothing about ALL lions.
>
> lo'e doesn't seem to work either, because again, that refers to a typical
> something, and doesn't include ALL somethings.
>
> Next we come to "ro", which means all-of, so "ro le tcadu...": all-of
> the-ones-described-as cities... but that still doesn't quite say what I
> want: "All cities are in countries" doesn't imply a bidirectional n-to-1
> relationship (If Paris is a city, and all cities are in countries, then
> Paris is in countries -- exists in multiple countries at once.)
>
> Okay, the next section seems promising, in that it lists je'abo, that which
> indeed is. So "je'abo le tcadu cu cmima...": That-which-indeed-is
> one-described-as-a city is a member of...
>
> But I'm having trouble with "one and only one country". "pa le gugde", one
> something-described-as-a country" again doesn't imply the bidirectional
> relationship I'm looking for.
>
> Halp?


  Actually, you basically had it... ro tcadu cu se stizu pa gugde.
The key is that when there is more  then one quantifier, each "scopes"
over those that follow.  You will see this covered in detail in
chapter 16 of the grammar.   So what this means is that for each city,
there is exactly one country in which it is situated. It does NOT mean
that all cities are located in the same country (which would be the
case if you had reversed it as "pa gugde cu stizu ro tcadu").

   Hope that helps?

 (P.S.  My son's first name is the same as your last name)

                --gejyspa