[lojban] Re: all species of birds

[Jorge "Llambías" <jjllambias2000@yahoo.com.ar>]

la pier cusku di'e
> There's a sentence which requires putting a prenex in a subordinate clause. 
> {la fang. niukasl., noi te bilma fi lo cipni be roda, cu me loi pejrai je 
> catryrai be le munje be'o ke cipni terbilma} is incorrect because no bird 
> belongs to all species. How about these?:
> la fang. nuikasl. noi roda zo'u lo cipni be da cu bilma li'o
> la fang. nuikasl. noi ro se cipni zo'u lo cipni cu bilma li'o

Well...

If you understand {lo cipni} as {su'o lo cipni} (which is indeed the
most official interpretation, though not mine, see below) then the
first attempt fails for the reason you say, but I'm not sure the 
others work. You would be saying that for each species there is at
least one bird with the illness. The original just says
"END, which affects all species of birds", so may be it should be
{la fang. niukasl. noi ro da zo'u ro cipni be da ka'e bilma li'o},
since presumably that a species is affected means all of its members 
can get the illness and not that some of them do or can get it.

If you take the view that bare {lo} corresponds to a single referent
rather than to a quantified expression, as proposed here:
http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=XS+gadri+proposal
then the original expression is fine as it has a generic sense,
it means "a bird of any species" instead of "a bird of all species".

(The tiki page that used to have And's version of the XS proposal seems
to be lost, probably when the tiki was moved. Any idea how to
recover it, Robin?)

Another possibility would be to say {lo cipni be makau}, "a bird of
whatever species", but this one is still iffy for me.

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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