Re: [lojban] Re: Again {xorlo} and Wiki.

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On 6/16/05, John E Clifford <clifford-j@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> In xorlo, {lo cribe} is
> bears, unspecified in every possible way
> including number (indeed, unspecifiable without
> changing the sumti) 

Yes!

> and {lo pa cribe} is an
> uspecified bunch of unit bunches of bears
> (typically by context a single such, I think --
> but context is so tricky that "typical" may not
> be meaningful).

I won't say that's wrong because you are probably using
"bunch" in some technical sense, but it doesn't sound
right with the ordinary meaning of bunch. Indeed the
inner {pa} excludes bunches of bears. Example:

    lo pa cribe cu tijmau lo re remna
    A single bear is heavier than two humans.

A bunch of bears would be even heavier, of course, but the
point here is that one bear is heavier than two humans.

>  In xorlo, {pa lo cribe} still means
> "one out of the referent of {lo cribe}" but that
> referent is now (albeit indirectly) definitely at
> least all the bears in the world, so {pa lo
> cribe} amounts to (thouhg by a differnt route)
> {pa da poi cribe}, as it did in CLL. 

I don't think {pa lo cribe} contains any implicit "in the world",
but it certainly differs from {lo pa cribe}. For example:

   pa lo cribe cu tijmau re lo remna
   Exactly one bear is heavier than exactly two humans.

This means that if we sort bears and humans by weight,
from lightest to heaviest, the sequence will start:

(Zero or more bears here), 
Human1, 
(Zero or more bears here), 
Human2, 
Bear1, 
Human3, ...
(Any number of bears and humans here).

That is the only way that exactly one bear (Bear1) 
is heavier than exactly two humans (Human1 and Human2).
All other bears are either heavier than less than two humans,
or heavier than more than two humans.

> Note this
> is different from {lo pa cribe}, which allows
> that more than one bear does whatever pa lo cribe
> does though still gets translated as/ translates
> "a/one bear." 

{lo pa cribe} simply does not allow more than one bear 
to enter into the picture. Once you allow more than one
bear into the picture, {lo pa cribe} is no longer usable.

mu'o mi'e xorxes