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Re: [lojban] Re: A (rather long) discussion of {all}
On 5/29/06, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:
On 5/28/06, Maxim Katcharov <maxim.katcharov@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> What I'd like to know is how you account for the building being
> surrounded. What surrounds it?
The students.
Avoiding the word "mass"/"crowd" when you say "the students" does not
mean that "the students" does not refer to a group of students. It
does.
> Each student does *not* surround it.
Correct.
> What surrounds it is that "mass" of students.
That's one way of doing it, yes, and a valid way. That's the singularist way.
Another valid way is to use plural reference: "the students" is not taken
to refer to a single thing, but rather to many things at the same time.
It is not taken to have one referent but many.
What are you talking about when you say "the students"? You don't mean:
1) each student individually
2) that quantity of students together
so what is it that you mean? Show me how and what "the students"
refers to. If it does not refer to (1), then your argument falls prey
to my white dog example. I can expound on this concept of a mass, with
examples etc. Same goes for the concept of "each student". I doubt
that you'll be left anything to explain your position with once you
start explaining. The pluralist view relies on not looking too deeply
at what "the students" means, because once you do you see that it's
either (1) or (2).
Additionally, I don't think that Lojban uses this mistaken concept of
"plural predication": it seems that the book that describes it has not
been published yet, and so Lojban predates it by about 20 years.
> It's a type of thing
> that can be clearly recognized - we even have names for it: crowd,
> mob, swarm.
Indeed, those are useful concepts and we have several words to cover
them: gunma, girzu, bende, etc.
> You seem to have a belief that you can say that each student surrounds
> the building, but only when seen in the company of other students.
No, I have no such belief.
Then what surrounds the building? Please give an explanation,
hopefully a detailed one, as opposed to a vague 2-word answer.
> And
> aha! You don't have to introduce some sort of strange and
> other-worldly entity that clearly doesn't belong. How efficient!
I don't think encompassing entities are other-worldly at all, they are
ordinary and useful concepts. But in some cases using plural reference
is more convenient.
> > In my view {re loi ci nanmu} means the same as {re lo ci nanmu}, because
> > the non-distributivity introduced by {loi} is then cancelled by the
> > distributivity
> > of the outer {re}. You'd have to say {loi re lo ci nanmu} to get a
> > non-distributive
> > "two of three".
>
> This doesn't strike you as unnecessarily complex?
No, I think treating outer quantifiers uniformly is the simplest option.
That way, when you say for example {ci ko'a} you don't have to keep
track of whether {ko'a} had been assigned with a non-distributivity marker
or not. You just need to remember what its referents are.
> > But it is still useful to have a neutral form
> > of the sumti, so that you can combine distributive and non-distributive
> > predication without having to replicate the sumti.
>
> Use {lu'o} (or whatever) after a {gi'e} in the same transient manner
> in which English occasionally uses "together". There are many other
> solutions.
{lu'o} belongs in selma'o LAhE. Its syntax consists of changing a sumti
into another sumti. It can't be used after {gi'e}.
I know this. Because it seems that {lu'o} is rudundant, I'm throwing
out the idea that it might serve to discard the word, and then give it
a new definition.
> I think it deserves mention that I don't see it as a "neutral form" at
> all, since I don't think that such a thing exists, aside from as an
> ambiguous structure in your version of Lojban.
Consider this sentence: "The three men lifted the piano".
We can ask for more precision in many different ways:
(1) When did they do it, yesterday or last month?
(2) How many times did they do it, once or seven times?
(3) Where did they do it, inside the house or outside?
(4) How did they do it, with their bare hands or with the help of a crane?
(5) How did they do it, quickly or slowly?
(6) How did they do it, together or individually?
The precision obtained from answering (6) is no more special than the
precision obtained from answering any of the other questions.
That sounds very nice, but no, it's quite different. 1 through 5 are
all questions regarding the relationship - where did the act occur, by
what means did it occur, etc. 6 is a question regarding the sumti -
are we treating these men as a mass/plural, or individually? So let's
rephrase:
(3) Which piano did they lift, the one that was inside the house or outside?
Now, when we get a response to that question, the referent doesn't
change in the same way that "together or individually" would change
it. Take our student example:
{[L_ muno tadni] cu [dasni lo mapku] gi'e [sruri le dinju]}
When you ask "together, or individually?", you don't get an answer
(though in each one of your other examples, you would). You get a
re-statement, because once you specify the sumti no longer refers to
two different things at the exact same time. So yes, it is different
from all the 5 you mentioned prior to it.
This brings us right back to:
2) You can't use {lo danlu cu bajra gi'e blabi} to refer to a white
dog and running cats, and so you can't use {[L_ muno tadni] cu [dasni
lo mapku] gi'e [sruri le dinju]} to refer to a number of students and
to a mass composed of students. A mass of students is, whether it's
convenient or not, a different entity than what each one of the
students is. There is no way to refer both to "mass composed of X" and
"X" at the same time (there is no superclass).