Re: [lojban] pro-sumti question

["Jorge Llambias" <jjllambias@hotmail.com>]

la greg cusku di'e

> I can't now work out what {le remei} actually means. How would it differ
> from {lei remei}?

le remei = each of the pairs
lei remei = all the pairs together

> It is, however likely that {lu'o le gerku .e le mlatu cu tatpi} doesn't 
> mean
> that all of them are tired. Otherwise an officer telling his superior "lei
> nanmu cu tatpi" would not be telling the truth.

For {lei nanmu cu tatpi} to be true, it is not necessary that
{ro le nanmu cu tatpi} be true. However, {pa le nanmu cu tatpi}
does not entail {lei nanmu cu tatpi}. If the officer tells
his superior {lei nanmu cu tatpi} just because one of them
is, he would not be telling the truth. The group as a whole
should be tired.

> I think this is one place where the book is right in the wrong way. The
> implicit quantifiers on lei don't work as they should. A mass, considered 
> as
> a mass, is either tired or isn't (otherwise masses are as useful as sets).
> We can't have a situation where {lei nanmu cu tatpi .ije naku lei nanmu cu
> tatpi} is true.

Right. At least not any more than {mi ge tatpi ginai tatpi}.

> I'm going around in circles saying nothing here, so here are the main
> points, which should go of into three seperate threads:
>
> - How do we refer to the referents of the sumtis of the last sentence? (I
> think some sort of prosumti should be experimented with)

The problem is that we don't want such precision. For example,
we may have something like "X said such and such. Y said such
and such. Then _they_ went away."

In your scheme, you would get a prosumti for "Y and what Y said",
not one for "X and Y". The prosumti we want here is necessarily
vague, and {le remei} (or {le romoi}, or whatever number works best
in context) I think is the best we have. I used this method a few
times in the Alice translation.

> - What do we do about these stupid-mass-things (pe'i la djan cowan po'o 
> ka'e
> ciksi). It makes no sense to be able to say {loi cmacu cu crinu} because I
> decided that dying my own hair green wasn't enough.

But notice that {pisu'o} is the right quantifier for {loi},
just like {su'o} is for {lo}. {loi smacu cu crino}
says that some mice are green, about the same as {lo smacu cu crino},
since there is not much difference here in being green together
or individually.

mu'o mi'e xorxes



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