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Re: [lojban] pro-sumti question In-Reply-To F220eoZTR5IwNdJiRcJ00006c79@hotmail.



In a message dated 7/6/2002 5:58:51 PM Central Daylight Time, jjllambias@hotmail.com writes:


As long as people don't take those rules too literally,
that's ok. But Lojbanists tend to soon forget the spirit
of the rule and run with the letter, with disastrous results.
(We tend to read the rule written for humans as if it had
been written for machines.)


Painfully true and so the more reason to write the rules very carefully in the beginning, leaving very little to "spirit."  I think this can be done generally in these cases, though there are many hard ones -- "win", for example -- especially outside games with rules.

<<Take the eating case. The rule here should give something
like this:

  ko'a citka ko'e
    fo'a citka fo'e
    ko'a joi fo'a citka ko'e joi fo'e

But this one will also probably be true:

    ko'a joi fo'a citka ko'e e fo'e

This one, however, should be false:

    ko'a e fo'a citka ko'e joi fo'e

All of that follows from the semantics of {citka}, whatever
the sum rules may say.>>

I should think that that is just about what the rules should say -- plus, of course, that when the eaten is quantized, the quantities are to be summed aritmetically by category.  I wonder if we need de-massing rules as well.  What does carry over from mass to individual?  Is Division a worse fallacy than Composition?  Again, I suspect we can make rules here, and, indeed, the remarks about when {joi} can be replaced by {e} are along that line.


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