Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: Where should I use sets and where should I use masses?

On 7 Wrz, 00:18, Jorge Llambías <jjllamb...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 4:39 PM, ianek <jane...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 5 Wrz, 00:24, Jorge Llambías <jjllamb...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 4:52 AM, ianek <jane...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> > It's a property of being a cliquehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clique_(graph_theory).
>
> >> If you restrict "simxu" to the cliques of graph theory, you can't use
> >> it for something like:
>
> >> lo zajba pu simxu lo ka ce'u ce'u sanli kei gi'e se morna lo remna pramide
> >> "The gymnasts stood on one another's shoulders and formed a human pyramid."
>
> > So what {simxu} really means? That the graph is connected?
>
> Maybe even that is not completely necessary. Probably something like
> most/almost all nodes must be connected to other nodes and the
> connections have to be dense enough.
>
> >Arguments
> > based on something that sounds good in a natural language are
> > suspicious for me. The definitions of Lojban words are (in most cases)
> > in a natural language, but it doesn't mean that they should be
> > ambiguous.
>
> Vague is not the same as ambiguous. You can always define a more
> precise word ("rolrelsi'u"? "simymu'o"? something else?) for the more
> specific meaning. If you make "simxu" require full pairwise
> distributivity, you make it practically unusable for most ordinary
> contexts.

This is exactly the problem with Lojban. It aims at being logical, but
the more logical, the more unusable it is, and vice versa. Some time
ago I thought it was possible to translate from Lojban to formal
logic...

It's as logical as you want it to be. If you believe simxu to be fully pairwise, then so be it. I mean, what xorxes and selpa'i have said is simply their interpretation of what it means; doesn't mean it's that way and no way else. I believe that simxu is fully pairwise, and therefore I would never have given the previous gymnasts example, but I'm not going to misunderstand if someone uses it differently. This is an important aspect of Lojban: not everyone speaks the same way (in fact, it's unlikely that any two people speak the same way) and no one must try to impose their will on another.

Lojbanists like to give away their interpretation as if it were the law without acknowledging that there be any other interpretation. However, it is definitely simpler to do so than to explain the various different interpretations and their differences, although doing so would be more "right" in my opinion.

latro'a and I have a strict(er) view of Lojban in that regard and believe than simxu1 must be a set, and that the simxu action is fully pairwise. {mi ce do simxu lo ka cinba} therefore has the obvious meaning. Likewise, {lo'i nanmu ce lo'i ninmu cu simxu lo ka cinba} (I'm using ce as a cheap set addition because I can't be bothered to really look up how to do it) doesn't mean that all the men kissed all the women and vice-versa; it means that each of the men kissed each of the women and also *was kissed* by each of them. That would be my intended interpretation of that, for instance.

.i mi'e la tsani mu'o

>
> mu'o mi'e xorxes

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