RE: [lojban] Re: The Any thread

["Craig" <ragnarok@pobox.com>]

>>How one can be a friend to a nonspecific doctor is hard to imagine.

>If you say "she is friendly to doctors" you are not saying that
>she is friendly to any specific doctor.

But then she is friendly to doctors in general, while lo mikce does not
guarantee the plurality of the mikce.

>>Under what circumstances,
>>assuming cooperative communication, would you say such a thing?

>Suppose Harry, who doesn't know John, wants to know whether
>Mary needs some doctor. He asks {xu la meris nitcu lo mikce}.
>I know that Mary needs John, who happens to be a mikce, so
>I must answer {go'i}.

Not if you wish to be helpful. Harry might then get Doctor Bar, thinking he
will satisfy Meris' need. If you wish to help, you say something like {i
go'i la djan} - to specify that she does nitcu, and while indeed her
selnitcu is a mikce she does not nitcu any old mikce and hence you do not
wish to say that she nitcu lo mikce.

>>Only if
>>there was no specific doctor identity to work with. Had there been a
>>specific doctor she needed, you surely would have used le instead.

>Not necessarily. In this case, the question was posed with {lo}
>and I have to answer {go'i} or {na go'i}. I only have to decide
>whether {la meris nitcu lo mikce} is true or false when Mary
>needs John, who happens to be a doctor. In traditional Lojban,the answer is
>unequivocally {go'i}. The way you want {lo} to work,
>which I would prefer too, the answer should be {na go'i} if Mary
>needs John, a doctor, to help her carry the boxes but is otherwise
>healthy and in no need for medical attention.

The answer {go'i} is technically true but very unhelpful. The answer {na
go'i} is technically false but won't get Harry to (needlessly) call Doctor
Bar.

>>lo'e is a little heavy-handed. It achieves its nonspecificity by stripping
>>all distinction away from the doctors. "friendly to doctors" doesn't
>>necessarily apply to nontypical doctors, whereas lo mikce does include
>>them

>I use {lo'e} the way you say {lo} works, that's all I'm saying.

Grammatically, I think that lo'e acts like lo, but semantically I agree with
xod: it doesn't have quite the meaning you want. Now, perhaps as Lojban
evolves and it is seen that lo'e is rarely used elsewhere but this
distinction is necessary, an evolution to your current lo and a lo'e like my
current lo will occur. But I don't think that's the status quo.

>{lo} is not defined in traditional Lojban the way you want it.

Yes it is.