[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

[lojban] Re: lo questions

On Fri, Feb 1, 2008 at 9:36 PM, Chris Capel <pdf23ds@gmail.com> wrote:
>  But I'm finding myself confused about the effects
> of the proposal. Here's a section I'm rewriting.
>
> > So lo ci gerku means 'any/some of three dogs', or more simply, 'three dogs'. (As a conversational convention, we can assume that the "any/some" means "all" when the number is specified after lo.) ci lo gerku, however, means more like 'three of any/some dogs', i.e. three out of a group of dogs of unspecified size. That's still useful, but probably not what we have in mind when, in English, we say "three dogs".
>
> Is this accurate so far?

The statement "lo ci gerku means 'any/some of three dogs'" doesn't sound
very accurate to me. There is no 'any/some of' in the Lojban phrase, nor any
'all' involved either.

It's like saying "{lo gerku} means 'a black or a white or some other colour,
male or female, one year old or two years old or of some other age dog'".
None of that is part of {lo} and neither is any quantifier.

>Now here's where I'm confused. If "lo ci
> gerku" is the best equivalent of "three dogs", then wouldn't we expect
> "ci gerku" to also mean "three dogs"? And yet, according to the gadri
> proposal[3], "ci gerku" means "ci lo gerku", or "three of some dogs".
> That seems backwards to me.

{ci [lo] gerku} is not very meaningful by itself. An outer quantifier is an
operator, and it needs a full bridi to operate on.

{ci [lo] gerku cu broda} means that among the referents of {lo gerku},
i.e. among dogs, there are three and no more than three that satisfy
the predicate {... broda}.

Inner quantifiers are not operators. {lo ci gerku} is all by itself a
complete meaningful expression. It's a sumti, with one or more
referents. When we use it in a sentence we will be saying something
about those referents.

mu'o mi'e xorxes


To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to lojban-list-request@lojban.org
with the subject unsubscribe, or go to http://www.lojban.org/lsg2/, or if
you're really stuck, send mail to secretary@lojban.org for help.