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

[".arpis." <rpglover64+jbobau@gmail.com>]

This is a can of worms for several reasons.

First, don't use wiktionary, use http://jbovlaste.lojban.org/ or http://vlasisku.lojban.org/

Second, I refer you to http://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Third, I invite you to ignore the second statement I made, as this section of the grammar is out of date:  this page is a more recent coverage of the topic: http://www.lojban.org/tiki/BPFK+Section%3A+gadri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 <eatingstaples@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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