Re: [lojban] lo/loi

[Pierre Abbat <phma@webjockey.net>]

On Monday 03 November 2003 05:18, Mr Ekted wrote:
> I've been working through the lojban lessons, and I have a question about
> translating the following sentence:
>
> "No more than 15% of Buddhists eat meat."
>
> The answer page says it's:
>
> "su'e pipamu loi budjo cu citka lo rectu"
>
> But by my understanding (admittedly new) it seems almost overkill to use
> loi here rather than lo. "15% of Buddhists" compared to "15% of the mass of
> all Buddhists"? It seems like there is no distinction of meaning, as there
> is with le/lo. I can understand being "picky" with meaning to avoid
> ambiguity, but this case seems to be different. Is there a subtle
> difference meaning that I am not understanding?

"su'e pipamu lo budjo cu citka lo rectu" means "at most .15 of a Buddhist eats 
meat". That is, there is at least one Buddhist such that no more than .15 of 
each one eats meat - which doesn't make sense.

A problem with "su'e pipamu loi budjo" is that not just Buddhist people cu 
budjo - so do Buddhist books, Buddhist temples, and Buddhist ideas.

> Also what about this:
>
> "su'e pipamu ro budjo cu citka lo rectu"

I think you're dealing with fractions of Buddhists again, though I'm not quite 
sure. What you want is "vei su'e pipamu pi'i ro ve'o budjo cu citka lo 
rectu".

An example where these distinctions do make sense is colors of sheep, since a 
sheep can be .15 white.
su'e pipamu lo lanme cu blabi - at most .15 of a sheep is white.
su'e pipamu loi lanme cu blabi - at most .15 of the mass of sheep is white.
This means that if you combine the color of sheep into one big mass, at most 
.15 of it is white. It says nothing about how that is distributed among 
sheep.
vei su'e pipamu pi'i ro ve'o lanme cu blabi - at most .15 of all sheep are 
white.
This means that individual sheep are white, and the number of such sheep does 
not exceed .15 times the total number of sheep.

phma
-- 
.i toljundi do .ibabo mi'afra tu'a do
.ibabo damba do .ibabo do jinga
.icu'u la ma'atman.

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