[lojban-beginners] Re: Story time

[Jorge "Llambías" <jjllambias2000@yahoo.com.ar>]

--- Andrew Archibald <archibal@math.mcgill.ca> wrote:
> I think, upon more careful reading, that the correct
> interpretation of <quantifier X> <quantifier Y> zo'u <predicate>  is
> <quantifier X> such that <quantifier Y> such that <predicate>.  Is
> this correct? 

That's the standard (CLL) interpretation, yes.

> Can I say "There is no (X,Y) such that X sees Y"?  

I don't think we have a defined way of doing that. Something
like {no vu'i da e de zo'u da viska de} might do the trick, but 
this is mostly unexplored territory. (And it is not clear in
what cases that would be better than just {naku zo'u da viska de}.

> I can't understand
> what the CLL has to say about "grouping of quantifiers" to tell
> whether this is what they do (although jbofi'e doesn't seem to think
> so).  

CLL proposes using termsets to get coordinate scope for quantifiers
(as opposed to the second quantifier having subordinate scope to the
first), but I don't think that can work. Termsets already have another
function. In fact, CLL even gives them a third function (in chapter 10,
section 25) which is also incompatible with their main function. 

> But linguistic details aside, evidently this construction is wrong or
> unclear to people who know the language, so I'll try to find a clearer
> one that lets me use the attitudinals.
> 
> {.i lo pulji cu klama by. .ije ku'i naku .ianai da pu zi viska de}
> ... but it didn't happen (unlikely!) that somebody saw something.
> 
> {.i lo pulji cu klama by. .ije ku'i noda .ianai viska de}
> ... but nobody (unlikely!) saw anything.
> 
> {.i lo pulji cu klama by. .ije ku'i roda viska node .ianai}
> ... but everybody saw nothing (unlikely!).
> 
> 
> Since there was practically nobody still in the bar by the time the
> police got there, the first seems like the best.  I did rather like
> being able to express incredulity on both "nobody" and "anything". 
> 
> Does
> {.i lo pulji cu klama by. .ije ku'i noda .ianai viska su'o .ianai de}
> ... but nobody (unlikely!) saw any(unlikely!)thing.
> or even
> {.i lo pulji cu klama by. .ije ku'i noda .ianai viska su'o pa .ianai de}
> ... but nobody (unlikely!) saw even one (unlikely!) thing.
> work?

All of your proposed alternatives work. But with the double {ianai}s
I would either say {no ianai da ... su'o ianai de} or {noda ianai ...
su'ode ianai}. It's not clear why you would put the ianai in different
places for the two terms.

{su'opa} has the same meaning as {su'o}, and in fact {su'o} is the
default quantifier for {da}, so you could even just say {noda viska de}
plus the attitudinals. But it is not a problem to explicitly add 
{su'o} or {su'opa}.

> It seems like in order to make things like this comprehensible, users
> will have to pick a few common cases and memorize what they mean,
> using those whenever possible (just as we have in English and French;
> mathematicians use a few more).  Has this happened yet? 

No, and in some more complicated cases there might not even be 
agreement about what the prescription is. Even in English, though
the standard dialect uses "nobody saw anything" some dialects use
"nobody saw nothing", so it is no wonder that both {noda viska de}
and {noda viska node} are to be considered. 

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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