Re: [lojban-beginners] Question about {roda}

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 12:23 AM, Michael Turniansky
<mturniansky@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2011/2/20 Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>
>>
>> Then I don't understand the distinction you want to make between "ro
>> da xebni mi" and "ro prenu cu xebni mi".
>>
>> Sure, the second one is more restricted than the first, but only a
>> little bit. They are both just as nonsensical if taken to extremes,
>> since someone who says "everyone hates me" usually doesn't mean to say
>> that they hate themselves any more than they mean to say that the
>> kitchen sink hates them.
>>
>     True.  And if the person is speaking precisely and doesn't really mean
> it literally, the should have either a ba'u  after the "ro", change the ro
> to "so'a", or stick a "le" after the ro.  But I also think that is much
> easier to be context dependent with a real gismu/tanru/fu'ivla/lujvo than
> with with an existential variable.

I certainly don't dispute that usually the more words you add, the
less you need to rely on context.

My only objection was to saying that "ro da xebni mi" was so much
different from "ro prenu cu xebni mi" in how much you are getting from
the context. The additional restriction that "prenu" adds in this
particular context is really minor, because we can normally be fairly
certain that anything that hates will be a person. There are much more
important restrictions that are still being left unstated.

>     But to say that "ro prenu" is only a "little bit" more restricted that
> "ro da"?  I don't think so.   There's basically 6 billion prenu in this
> world, and ?? in the universe, but there's somewhere around 2^(10^43)
> different ways you can arrange the atoms in the universe.. quite a bit more
> "things" that fall under the rubric of "ro da".

(I think we are closer to 7 billion now.) But most of them (whether
material things or persons) will be irrelevant to the claim at hand.
And in any case you are forgetting about the infinite number of things
that are not obtained by any rearrangement of the atoms of the
universe, (the natural numbers, to name just the most obvious one)
which will completely dwarf any finite number of things, so any finite
number combination of atoms is irrelevant if you want to compare
numbers.


>  But I still think it's easier to contextualize "djedi" than "da".

Of course, "djedi" contains more information than "da", which contains none.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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