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

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 12:35 PM, ranoritc <ranorith@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> If I say "the purple dog is white" is true then
> necessarily the sentence "the dog is white" is true (for some dog).
> Similarly in lojban, if "lo zirpu gerku cu blabi" then "lo gerku cu
> blabi".

But hopefully that doesn't mean that "lo" has a default color.

> In the three examples I gave above, the first "lo
> no gerku cu blabi" was meant to show how a quantifier could contradict
> the generalisation,

"lo no gerku" is self-contradictory, it's nonsense. You are making a
reference to something and at the same time saying that the number of
referents is zero. It can only work in a metaphorical sense. "lo no
gerku cu blabi" does not mean "no gerku cu blabi".

> the second to show how a quantifier could be
> independent from (not imply or be implied by) the generalisation,

"lo piso'e gerku" is presumably something like "lo barda pagbu be lo
gerku". It is only an example of an "inner quantifier" in a purely
syntactic sense, but it's meaning is not related to the ordinary use
of inner quantifiers.

> and
> the third was a bit of a joke, so feel free to ignore that.

It was the only meaningful one in the standard use of inner quantifiers.

> Suffice to say, quantifiers are not seltau, they act differently to
> seltau, and that should in my opinion be part of the written law of
> lojban, not just "oh but we know from context when someone says 'lo
> gerku' they mean 'lo su'o gerku' but maybe they don't"

"lo su'o gerku" or "lo ro gerku" are always a possible restatement of
"lo gerku", at least any time that the concept of number is
meaningful, since the number of referents of a term is always the
total number of its referents, and it has to be at least one for it to
be interpretable. "su'o" and "ro" can only be used for emphasis as
inner quantifiers, since they add no information. In any case "inner
quantifiers" are not logical quantifiers, and the important thing
about xorlo is that a term like "lo broda" does not quantify the bridi
it appears in, it is just a term.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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