Re: pc answers

[ucleaar <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>]

Jorge:
> My idea is that any inside quantifier is in some sense part of the
> description, and independent of what's going on elsewhere, so, just
> like {lo gerku} is "at least one of all those that are dogs", then
> {lo ci lo gerku} is "at least one of some three that are dogs" and
> "all those that are dogs" and "some three that are dogs" are determined
> before the quantification of all the arguments.
> In other words, the outer quantifier in {lo gerku} selects from
> {lo'i gerku}, and the one in {lo ci lo gerku} would select from
> {lo'i ci lo gerku}, and all such sets are defined initially and
> not within the scope of other quantifiers.
> But in the case of {ci lo gerku}, (or {ci lo mu lo gerku}, etc)
> The selection of the cimei happens within the normal scope,
> because it is an outer quantifier.

This seems very practical. So the nine dog is

   ci nanmu cu pencu ci gerku

and the three dog, three man is

   ci nanmu cu pencu ro lo ci lo gerku
   ci gerku cu se pencu ro lo ci lo nanmu

Having to put that second {lo} in is a bit annoying. The innermost
quantifier with {lo} is always pretty pointless. The only time it's
useful, I think, is in the contrast between

  ro broda

and

  ro lo suo broda

the latter, but not the former, asserting that there is such a broda.

But hang on - would that mean that {lo broda} is not equivalent to
{da poi broda}? Does "at least one of all those that broda" require
that there be at least one broda? Ah, but {lo broda} doesn't really
mean that, it means "there is a suo mei, such that each of its members
is a broda". So no problems here.

> > But at this stage I would simply like to establish and get general
> > agreement that Lojban ought to have a comprehensive method of doing
> > afterthought scope. For me the upshot of The Any Debate was that there
> > is such a need.
> Well, I don't know. A comprehensive method probably can be worked out.
> But if it will require a lot of new cmavo, and a lot of complication
> in use, then I doubt it would be worth it. There is no point in having
> afterthought available if it will still require a lot of thought
> to use it right. I think Lojban ought to have it only if the
> comprehensive method is simple enough to use. I have to think more
> about it.

Yes but you can't necessarily intuitively tell what is and isn't
easy to use. I'm constantly amazed that we manage to use English
syntax so effortlessly - you just think of what you want to say, &
ping! it comes out in all this baroque syntactic complexity. But on
the other hand, things that one might have thought to be easy turn
out to be difficult. So, the only way to find out is to offer
alternatives & see which of them people tend to use. That tends to
be the Lojban way.

---
And