[lojban-beginners] Re: POM: set the course as I said

["Jorge Llambías" <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On 1/31/07, Cortesi <dcortesi@mindspring.com> wrote:
> per the cmavo list, {me'i} is PA3 "less than" so {me'imoi} = less-
> than-as-an-ordinal-value
> which seems like it should mean "Always-first".

{me'i N} is "less than N".

{me'i} by itself defaults to {me'i ro} "less than all" = "not all".

This is one of the four quantifiers of Aristotle's term logic, along with
{ro}, {su'o} and {no}:

 ro broda cu brode
 All Ss are P.

 su'o broda cu brode
 Some Ss are P.

 no broda cu brode
 No Ss are P.

 me'i broda cu brode
 Not all Ss are P.

{ro moi} means "last", and {me'i moi} = {me'i ro moi} is other-than-last, i.e.
before last.

{me'i moi} would cover first, second, third, ... up to next-to-last.

In the case when there are only two members in the sequence,
{me'i moi} will collapse to {pa moi}, "first".

> Whatever other ordinal number you might have in
> mind, {me'imoi} is less-than it! This being able to make any
> PA into an ordinal is cool... but it makes me wonder
> what {me'imei} (less-than-as-cardinal) would mean. Always-least?

{me'i ro mei} in principle would be a group consisting of less than all of
its members. This is not very meaningful, because every group consists
of all of its members, so if {me'i mei} is to acquire any meaning it
will probably not be {me'i ro mei}.

mu'o mi'e xorxes