| The reason for the rule on double quantifiers that Lojban uses is almost
certainly the enormous difficulty within logic otherwise of saying something like "Three men came into the saloon. Two of them well to the bar. One of these ordered a lime rickey." The straightforward logical form of this takes up a half-a-dozen lines at least and even the shortened forms designed to help logic over some of its problems with plurals (which Lojban shares to some extent) and subsets is three or four times as long as the English. The Lojban is at least comparable to the English -- with the rule as given in the book (which does require some binding adjustments even here), roughly ci da poi nanmu cu nerkal le barja .i re da zo'u ge da klama le barjyjbu gi pa da minde tu'a zoi gy lime rickey gy. (The last structure is required because the shifted quantifier is officially local, shifting to the subjset only for that one occurrence.) |