[lojban-beginners] Re: ci lo gerku vs lo ci gerku

[Ben Foppa <eatingstaples@gmail.com>]

Excellent, thorough response. Thank you!

On Apr 28, 2:31 pm, ".arpis." <rpglover64+jbo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> This is a can of worms for several reasons.
>
> First, don't use wiktionary, usehttp://jbovlaste.lojban.org/orhttp://vlasisku.lojban.org/
>
> Second, I refer you tohttp://dag.github.com/cll/6/7/, which is the
> reference's discussion on quantifiers.
>
> Third, I invite you to ignore the second statement I made, as this section
> of the grammar is out of date:  this page is a more recent coverage of the
> topic:http://www.lojban.org/tiki/BPFK+Section%3A+gadri
>
> Fourth, now that your head is probably spinning in technicalities (which you
> can safely ignore for now), there's a little history:http://www.lojban.org/tiki/How+to+use+xorlo
>
> To summarize, {lo broda} used to mean {su'o lo ro broda} or "at least one of
> all the brodas".  Changing the outer quantifier, you change how many members
> of the group you're talking about: {re lo broda} (in the past) = {re lo ro
> broda} = "exactly two of all of the things which really are brodas".  When
> you changed the inner quantifier, you were changing the number of things in
> the group about which you were talking, but since {lo} still had to refer to
> thing-which-really-are, the meaning was taken to be that {lo ci broda} meant
> "at least one of the three things that-really-are brodas, (but since it
> doesn't make sense to talk about _the_ three things if there are more than
> three things, there must be exactly three brodas in the world".
>
> This usage was rarely followed and not very useful in conversation, so now,
> {ci lo broda} means "exactly three things which are (or which I describe as)
> brodas" and {lo ci broda} means "at least one of the three brodas I'm
> talking about".
>
> If all that was too much, don't worry; TL;DR, {lo} has been changed to make
> much more sense, the literature has not yet been updated, and your question
> is mostly of historical value.
>
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 12:37 PM, Ben Foppa <eatingstap...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > In Lojban For Beginners (http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/
> > lojbanbrochure/lessons/less4articles.html), it is stated:
> > "So ci lo gerku means 'three of those which really are dogs', or in
> > plain words, 'three dogs'. lo ci gerku, however, means that we are
> > talking about [one or more of] the only three dogs in the world, which
> > is not something you'd really want to say."
>
> > I understand how "ci lo gerku" means "three of those which are really
> > dogs", but I don't understand how "lo ci gerku" means a subset of the
> > only three dogs in existence; based on the definition of "lo" given
> > there and on Wiktionary (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lo#Lojban), it
> > seems that "lo ci gerku" would mean "That which really was three dogs".
>
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> --
> mu'o mi'e .arpis.

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