[lojban] Re: Usage of lo and le

["Jorge Llambías" <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

On 5/10/06, Maxim Katcharov <maxim.katcharov@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/10/06, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:

> > I hope I never said that was my definition. It is not. {ro} is just "all",
> > not "all in context".
> >
> You had stated:
>
> > Well, for me {lo ro cribe} simply refers to all bears, (whatever
> > "all bears" is in the context),

That's right. Do you see the difference between "all in context"
and "all" in context? I need the context to figure out what "all"
quantifies, which in general won't be necessarily restricted to the
things present in the context.

> with regards to your zoo example:
>
> > xu do pu viska [lo ro cribe] ca lo nu do vitke le dalpanka
> > Did you see all bears when you visited the zoo?
> >
> > I don't have any specific bears in mind there, because I don't even know
> > how many bears the zoo has. I do intend to ask about all the bears at
> > the zoo, but all I know about them is that they are all the bears at the
> > zoo.
>
> In the Lojban half of your example, you use an inner ro, which in
> accordance with "{ro} is just 'all', not 'all in context' " should not
> refer to those bears that are at the zoo.

It could, but it need not, that's right.

Which means that your
> Lojban-half is asking if someone had seen all bears ever within the
> zoo, which is contrary to your ensuing English explanation. Am I
> correct?

No, "all" need not mean "all ever".

> > Right. You need context to figure out the precise referent of {lo ro cribe},
> > but it certainly does not normally refer to whatever bears are present in the
> > context.
>
> Erm. "all bears (ever)" /is/ the referent of {__ ro cribe}. If it
> isn't, then "all bears (figure out which 'all' I mean based on
> context)" would be the referent. Which I hope I demonstrated to be a
> Bad Thing.

No, what you showed is that having an implicit restriction to things
present in the context would be a bad thing. But having an implicit
restriction to all things ever would be just as bad.

> Sticking a {ro} into the inner means that you don't need context to
> "figure out"/make a best-guess - though you may very well need to know
> what the context is so that you can make things relative to it.

You always need context to figure out the meaning of an utterance,
in any language. In actual language use, context is always there.
It is only in isolated examples that context might be absent, and that's
why it is not all that fruitful to discuss these things with respect to
isolated examples.

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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