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Re: [lojban] Re: A (rather long) discussion of {all}

On 6/5/06, Maxim Katcharov <maxim.katcharov@gmail.com> wrote:

On 6/5/06, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>    lo pa no lo mu no tadni cu dasni lo mapku gi'e sruri lo dinju
>    10 of 50 students wore hats and surrounded a building.
>
So lo has a default outer {ro}?


No, it has no outer quantifier.


Because otherwise something like {lo
pano lo muno tadni} says "some number of 10 of 50 students".


No, just 10 of 50.


Additionally, I don't think that a double lo is sensible. {pa lo re lo
ci tadni} says the same thing as {pa lo ci tadni}.


Even if they did say the same thing, how does that make it not
sensible? There are usually many different ways of saying the same
thing.

Anyway, any number of LE's are allowed as long as there is an
intervening quantifier between each pair.



>      (1a) ro le tadni cu dasni lo mapku
>      (1b) la alis me le tadni
> => (1c) la alis cu dasni lo mapku
>
>      (2a) lu'o le tadni cu sruri lo dinju
>      (2b) la alis me le tadni
> => (2c) la alis kansa le drata tadni lo nu sruri lo dinju

...

Something like (1c) {la alis cu dasni lo mapku} provides a definite
link between Alice and the sumti-slot, which lets us know her exact
relationship to the students and to the surroundment of the building.

(2c), however, is suggestive at best. Consider:

(4a) lo tadni cu sruri lo tadni
(4c) la alis kansa le drata tadni lo nu sruri lo tadni
(4d) [alice] is accompanied by [the other students] in [the event of
(the students) surrounding the students]

Where is the relationship? Is Alice a surrounder, or one of the
surrounded? There's no definite indication.

So again, I ask you, what is the relationship between Alice and the
sumti-slot, the students who surround the building, the surroundment
of the building?


 la alis me pa le tadni poi lu'o ke'a sruri le dinju
 Alice is one of the students that surround the building together.


>      (3a) le tadni cu broda
>      (3b) la alis me le tadni
> => (3c) la alis ?
>
> Is that your question?

My question is: you have the pluralist view, and it has an ambiguous
{le tadni}, which could mean one of two things in any particular sumti
slot.


{le tadni} always refers the same things, but the slot it fills could be
marked as distributive or non-distributive, yes.


First, it could mean "distributively" (bunch-individually), as
in "the students wore hats". Second, it could mean
"non-distributively" (bunch-together), as in "the students surround
the building". If the difference between the two has nothing to do
with "mass", then what is the difference?


Introducing a mass is one way of dealing with it, so I wouldn't say it
has nothing to do with it. My preferred way of dealing with it is by not
introducing any encompassing entity, so:

la alis me pa le tadni poi ge ro ke'a dasni lo mapku gi lu'o ke'a
sruri le dinju
"Alice is one of the students which each wear a hat and together surround
the building".


> What can I say about Alice knowing that she is
> one of the students and knowing that the students are/do something, but
> not knowing whether the something is predicated distributively or
> collectively?

I don't think Alice knowing anything has anything to do with this. I
don't care what Alice knows, I care how she fits into the
relationship.


"What can I say about Alice, knowing that ..."

I'm sorry that the missing comma threw you off.


> The answer is: nothing.  From (3a) and (3b) there is nothing
> similar to (1c) or (2c) that I can conclude. Perhaps If I knew what {broda}
> was, I could make a fairly good guess as to whether in (3a) the predicate is
> meant distributively or collectively (or in some other way, see example
> below), and conclude accordingly about Alice, but without any markings,
> I cannot answer, just as I cannot answer whether the brodaing is meant to
> be happening now, in the past, or in the future (though again, with context I
> might be able to make a good guess).

A bit beside the point, but what would you look for as an indicator
that it is one and not the other?


Just my general knowledge of the world. For example, I know that hats
are normally worn by one person, so if I'm told that some students are
wearing hats I will assume that they do it individually and not together. If
I'm told that some students are surrounding a building, I will assume that
they are doing it together and not individually. When either distribution is
possible, and there are no clues in the context to suggest which one is the
case, I will ask the speaker whether they mean individually or together (if
it's important to determine that, it may be irrelevant too). Similarly
for tenses,
if someone says "Alice takes a hat out of her bag and puts the hat on her
head" I will assume that the taking of the hat out of the bag happened before
the putting it on the head, because that's the temporal ordering that makes
most sense. If there are no clues to figure out the temporal ordering, I have
to ask about it.


> Consider another example:
>
>      le pa no nanla cu bevri le pa no stizu le purdi
>      "The ten boys took the ten chairs to the garden."
>
> Now how could that be done? In many different ways:
>
> (1) Each boy took one chair.
> (2) Five boys took one chair each, one boy took two chairs, and the three
>      remaining boys took the last chair (a very heavy one perhaps).

It's enough to say that the group of boys took the group of chairs,
because it'll probably be your choice to see it in that way
(regardless of how who did what). If you want to be explicit about it,
you can just write it out in Lojban as you did here in English.


Indeed, that's my point.


> (3) All the boys together took all the chairs together (all stacked pehaps).
> (4) Many other combinations.
>
> We could, of course, say exactly how the boys distributed the chairs among
> themselves, but we may not need to. Maybe all we want is to say that the boys
> took the chairs to the garden, and the details of how they did it are irrelevant
> to us. Why should we be forced to spell everything out in painful detail?

You aren't. Painful detail would be writing (2) out in full when you
don't want to.


Exactly.


> Furthermore, if {le nanla} is to be interpreted as {ro le nanla} and
> {le stizu} as
> {ro le stizu}, we get that the simplest form {le nanla cu bevri le
> stizu le purdi}
> results in one very unlikely claim, that each of the boys took each of
> the chairs
> to the garden. (If we wanted to say that, it is very easy to add the {ro},
> but having the {ro} there by default is just very inconvenient.)

I lean more towards an outer {su'o} than an outer {ro}.


An outer {su'o} would be almost as bad in this case "at least one of the
ten boys took at least one of the ten chairs". But I want to say that the
ten boys took the ten chairs, without having to specify how they did it
distributionally. I don't want to make the much weaker claim that at least
one of the boys took at least one of the chairs.


> > > It's interesting to note that while Lojban has gadri corresponding to the
> > > {joi}-connective, it has no gadri corresponding to the {fa'u}-connective, so
> > > to get the "respectively" reading fully explicited you have to duplicate
> > > the sentence:
> > >
> > >  ro le tadni cu dasni pa le mapku ije ro re mapku cu se dasni pa le tadni
> >
> > ro ri mapku, yes.
>
> You probably mean {ro lo ri mapku}.
> {ro ri mapku} means "each of them is a hat".

You said {ije... ro re}, "all two". I assumed that you made a typo,
and meant something like "and those hats in the last sentence, each is
worn by a student"


Right, I made a typo but not that one: I meant {ro le mapku}.

mu'o mi'e xorxes