Lojbab's cnino selbebna sidbo

[Chris Bogart <cbogart@QUETZAL.COM>]

Lojbab says:
>loi mass statements have always been to me so inherently logically weak
>in their claim, that logical precision seemed superfluous.

Maybe it's possible to logically reason about masses, but there's no
inherent set of rules describing the relationship between masses and
individuals.  I think you can state some facts about loi dembi and reason
about them, but there's no way of knowing simply by looking at the grammar,
which of your conclusions applies to an individual bean; and vice versa --
you can reason about individual beans without knowing what also is true of
the mass.

loi dembi cu banzu .iku'i lo dembi cu na banzu
.i
lo dembi cu cmalu .iku'i loi dembi cu na cmalu

Some kind of logical reasoning engine might contain some general rules that
tell you that "banzu" doesn't in general scale down from masses to
individuals, but some other gismu can scale down.  But without those rules
it should treat loi dembi and lo dembi as completely unrelated entities.

ni'o

Concerning your claim that the use of bare "lo" is not strictly logical --
it would be nice if we could come up with a precise meaning for it.  Yes,
Lojban is supposed to allow both logical and non-logical discourse, but why
not make the most common register of usage be a logical one; after all
that's Lojban's primary appeal.

However it would be a shame if this quantifier scope argument ended up
invalidating lots of text, and/or more importantly, Lojbab's and others'
intuitive sense of how the existing language means.  Maybe we should take
more of a descriptive approach, listing logical sentences and what they seem
to mean intuitively to the best lojban speakers and in the best-written
lojban text, and figure out what the logical rules are.  I think that's
really what motivated Lojbab's "cnino selbebna sidbo" -- which at first
glance appears cnino je sidbo jenai selbebna.
                     ____
 Chris Bogart        \  /  ftp://ftp.csn.net/cbogart/html/homepage.html
 Quetzal Consulting   \/   cbogart@quetzal.com