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[lojban] Re: lo questions
On Sat, Feb 2, 2008 at 10:19 PM, <mungojelly@ixkey.info> wrote:
>
> The outer qualifier identifies how
> many out of the identified set were in the relation described; it
> relates the understood sumti to the bridi being constructed.
More or less. But consider:
ro lo nixli cu ponse re lo gerku .i ro lo gerku cu xekri
Each girl owns two dogs. All the dogs are black.
la djan na ponse re lo gerku
John does not own two dogs.
In neither of those cases are we claiming that two dogs are involved in the
relation described. In fact we are not saying how many dogs are involved.
The information given by {re} can only be understood in the context of the
whole bridi. It tells us how the referents of {lo gerku} are quantitatively
distributed in their relationship with the referents of other arguments of
the bridi, but we need to know what all the other operators involved are
(negations, logical connectives, other outer quantifiers) in order to
understand the contribution of {re}.
> It seems to me that every time you take a slice with the outer
> quantifier, you are in fact creating another coherent referent, which
> might be adding to the confusion!
Sometimes, but not "every time". When no negations or other quantifiers
get in the way, saying how many do something may be taken as an
indirect way of selecting those very ones that do get counted, and thus
establishing a new set of referents, but that does not happen
automatically every time that an outer quantifier is used.
mu'o mi'e xorxes
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