[lojban] Re: loglan/lojban masses/sets

[Rob Speer <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

On Mon, May 10, 2004 at 07:17:03PM -0700, Jorge Llamb?as wrote:
> > I'm pretty sure there must be a significant number of examples where
> > someone has said "lo broda" and could not be referring to Mr. Broda.
> > Perhaps the Mr. Broda meaning wouldn't contradict what they said, but
> > would certainly be more general than they intended.
> 
> I would bet that those examples are much fewer than the examples of
> people using lo when they can't possibly mean su'o. Perhaps we should
> analyse some definite corpus.

Looking in my corpus (mostly stuff downloaded from lojban.org's "texts"
directory), you're actually right. I found more examples where "lo"
refers to a general concept than where it was correctly used to mean
"su'o", at a quick glance.

But you've said that the new "lo" is supposed to be an empty gadri.
(This is a much more reassuring explanation than talking about Mr.
Broda, incidentally.) Why does it need to replace "lo'e", then? "lo'e"
can specifically talk about the general kind of object, while "lo" is
just vague about it.

And if "lo" is really defined to be an empty gadri, that doesn't
invalidate any usage at all. "lo finpe cu tolcitrai lo mabru" could mean
"Fish are older than mammals" or "some fish are older than some
mammals", and the sentence would be clarified by changing "lo" to "lo'e"
or "su'o".

-- 
Rob Speer