[lojban] Re: lo questions

["Jorge Llambías" <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Feb 2, 2008 at 6:59 PM, Chris Capel <pdf23ds@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Feb 2, 2008 3:02 PM, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > 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.
>
> I got "any/some" straight from the definition of lo in the BPFK
> proposal: "The resulting expression refers generically to *any or
> some* individual or individuals that fit as the first argument of the
> selbri."

But that's not the same thing. {la djan} may refer to the writer of CLL,
but it does not mean "the writer of CLL". In the BPFK definition the
English words "any or some" are being used as part of an explanation,
not given as the meaning of some Lojban expression. That a given
expression refers to some individual that fits as an argument of
a selbri does not imply that it means "some individual that fits as
an argument ...". A statement like "lo ci gerku means 'any/some of
three dogs'" introduces exactly the problem that xorlo was meant
to get us away from, the idea that {lo} carries an implicit quantifier
with it.

> > {ci [lo] gerku} is not very meaningful by itself. An outer quantifier is an
> > operator, and it needs a full bridi to operate on.
>
> So when LFB says
>
>   For example, {ci le gerku} means 'three of the dogs', while {le ci
> gerku} means 'the three dogs.'
>
> it's actually being misleading? Perhaps I don't understand gadri well
> enough to try to present a simplification.

I don't have much of a problem with that wording for {le}, but in the case
of {lo} both {ci lo gerku} and {lo ci gerku} can correspond to English
"three dogs", and they are not logically equivalent. So to understand the
difference it is not enough to give the English gloss, it is necessary
to understand what a quantifier does in predicate logic, to see why
{ci [any-bare-sumti]} is a quantifier expression, while {lo ci ...} is not.

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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