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?