[lojban] Re: Again {xorlo} and Wiki.

[John E Clifford <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

--- Opi Lauma <opi_lauma@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> on the Lojban-Wiki I have found the following:
>       A side effect of the above is that in
> xorlo, if
> you mean "one bear", consider actually saying
> "pa
> cribe". It's ever so much more specific. xorxes
> points
> out that to refer to one bear, "lo pa cribe" is
> actually a bit better; "pa cribe cu broda"
> means that
> exactly one cribe in the whole world brodas,
> which is
> often not what you want. We (those of us that
> have
> actually been using xorlo for the last few
> months;
> there are at least half a dozen active users on
> #lojban now) have found that context is almost
> always
> sufficient, however. 
> 
> And it is opposite to what I understood from
> answers
> on one of the my previous postings:
>       {pa cribe} = {pa lo cribe} = ?an bear?.
> 
> and opposite to what I understood from lessons
> of Nick
> Nicholas: 
>       {lo pa cribe} means that there exists
> only one
> bear in the world.
> 
> Where is true?
 
Lojban is evolving, sometimes rapidly.  Nick's
claim about {lo pa cribe} goes back to the days
when {lo cribe} was {lo ro cribe}, all the bears
in the world and internal quantifiers gave the
cardinal of the related set.  That has not been
the case for quite a while. It passed through the
stage where {lo cribe} was some unspecified bunch
of bears and the internal quantifier, if any, was
the cardinal of that bunch (compare {le cribe}
for a specified bunch).  In xorlo, {lo cribe} is
bears, unspecified in every possible way
including number (indeed, unspecifiable without
changing the sumti) and {lo pa cribe} is an
uspecified bunch of unit bunches of bears
(typically by context a single such, I think --
but context is so tricky that "typical" may not
be meaningful).  
The situation with external quantifiers is also
in some flux. In CLL and the intermediate stage,
{pa (lo) cribe} meant (exactly) one out of the
(unspecified) bunch of bears, which might or
might not be the same as (exactly) one out of all
the bears in the world (well,it pretty clearly
did in CLL).  In xorlo, {pa lo cribe} still means
"one out of the referent of {lo cribe}" but that
referent is now (albeit indirectly) definitely at
least all the bears in the world, so {pa lo
cribe} amounts to (thouhg by a differnt route)
{pa da poi cribe}, as it did in CLL.  Note this
is different from {lo pa cribe}, which allows
that more than one bear does whatever pa lo cribe
does though still gets translated as/ translates
"a/one bear." In this case, xorlo returns to CLL,
but loses a distinction (probably relatively
minor) that the intermediate position had).