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Re: [lojban] Re: A (rather long) discussion of {all}
On 6/1/06, Maxim Katcharov <maxim.katcharov@gmail.com> wrote:
The everyday sense of "set" is little more than "group".
> In this sense "set", "mass" or
> "group" are interchangeable.
I don't see how that follows.
"This set of pencils costs ten dollars."
That's the ordinary, everyday use of "set". It means that all the pencils
together, not each one individually, cost ten dollars. I can't really think
of an ordinary use in which "this set" means "each member of this set".
> lei ci vitke cu klama le zdani
> The three guests went into the house together.
Alright, perhaps they were so drunk that they had to lean on each
other, and only through communal effort managed to topple into the
house. (Otherwise they didn't do it together, though they did do it at
the same time: "concurrently".)
"The three guests went into the house together" is an ordinary
English sentence, and it normally has no implications that they do it
leaning on each other. We can also say "the group went into the
house" and again there's no implication that they did it in any
special way. But anyway, let's assume that the situation is as you
describe it.
Though I wouldn't usually see people going in as that sort of mass,
even if they were drunk, so I would seldom say {lei ci vitke...} in
the first place.
What about "the three people went into the house carrying a piano"?
> Now someone asks you:
>
> xo klama be le zdani cu se viska do
> How many goers-into-the-house did you see?
Note that this question is a bit off. Usually one would ask "how many
guests came in?" and not "how many acts of going in did you see?"
{xo klama} is not "how many acts of going?", that would be {xo nu klama}.
{xo klama} is "how many goers?".
> (B) Three. (The three guests.)
Yes, this would usually be my answer, since I'd seldom see people
going in "together"-as-in-{loi} in the first place.
Well, at least we agree on what answer we would give, if not for the same
motives.
> (C) Four. (The three guests and the mass of three guests.)
If I saw them come in as a mass, I wouldn't think that they came in
individually, and vice-versa.
So you agree that the same situation can be truthfully described as each
of three people coming in, or as a group of three people coming in
together, depending on how one thinks of it?
> le nanmu cu pamei bevri le pipno
> The men carried the piano singly.
>
> le nanmu cu romei bevri le pipno
> The men carried the piano "all-ly" (all together).
>
> le nanmu cu remei bevri le pipno
> The men carried the piano in pairs
>
> You could easily do the first two with your method, but the third one
> would be more complicated.
There's still no problem. And I think that you want {loi}:
{loi nanmu cu remei bevri le pipno}
"the mass of men pairishly carried the piano" /
"together the men pairishly carried the piano"
This is not a problem because tanru have no fixed meaning. "Pairishly
carried" could mean that the mass was a pair.
But the idea was that there were more than two men, let's say eight:
le bi nanmu cu remei bevri le pipno
The eight men carried the piano in pairs.
It wasn't the eight together that carried it.
You'll find that being
explicit ("each of set A is in a group/mass with only one other of set
A such that that group lifts a piano") is just as verbose in your
method.
More precision requires more verbosity, I agree. The question is,
can you be non-verbose when you don't need the precision?
You should just use the abstractor {su'u} to accomplish this vague
"something to do with these students (i.e. groups of them)" thing that
you'd like {lo} to do.
It's not something to do with the students, it's the very students
that I refer to with {le tadni}.
{lo su'u tadni} is not something that can surround buildings or carry
pianos or wear hats. Not that I know what it is, but it's something
along the lines of "studying", like {lo nu tadni}, {lo ka tadni}, or
{lo du'u tadni}, not something along the lines of "students" like
{lo tadni}, {loi tadni} or {le tadni}.
> > 13.1 "the students surround the building"
> > 13.2 "the students wear hats"
> >
> > In (1), what is the referent? "A surrounder of the building": "a mass
> > formed of students".
>
> Neither. "The students" does not have a single referent, it has many
> referents, namely student A, student B, student C, ... and student Z.
No. The students do not surround the building individually, therefore
there are not 26 referents.
{le tadni} has 26 referents. This is independent of what you then predicate
about them.
There is only one "surrounder of the
building", and therefore there is only one referent.
There are 26 people sorrounding the building.
In this case,
you're treating "the students" as a mass that surrounds the building.
No, I am treating "surround the building" as a collective predicate and
"the students" as a plural reference, i.e. one with many referents rather
than one.
It doesn't matter that "the students" can potentially refer to either
a mass or some individuals (a set) in your view.
It is the same people in both cases. It is not some people in one case
and a different entity in the other case.
> > The two referents are not the same. You can't pretend that they're the
> > same for the sake of translating
> >
> > "the students surround the building and wear hats"
> >
> > verbatim into Lojban.
>
> In the pluralist version, it makes no sense of talking about the two referents,
> because there are fifty referents involved, not two.
I should have said "two types of referents". One of them is the 50
students (that wear hats), one of them is the mass of 50 students
(that surrounds the building).
No, in both cases it is only the 50 students that get referred, nothing else.
What differs is the kind of predication that you apply to them, a
distributive predicate in one case "wear hats" and a non-distributive predicate
in the other case "surround the building". But both predicates are predicated
of the very same things, the fifty students, and nothing else.
mu'o mi'e xorxes