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[lojban] Re: A (rather long) discussion of {all}

On 6/4/06, Maxim Katcharov <maxim.katcharov@gmail.com> wrote:

On 6/4/06, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Each of a predicate's argument places _can_ be marked for it. It is
> not always marked, in the same way that tense is not always marked.

It wouldn't get marked in the same way as tense.


Right, it wouldn't. What they both have in common is that the marking
is optional, not how it is marked.


Tense marks the
entire bridi, or each sumti, and not the predicate place. It also uses
very specific words for it, as opposed to the trick that you want to
use with the outer quantifier (which, by the way, disallows "only 10
of the group surrounded the building and wore hats").


How does it disallow it?

  lo pa no lo mu no tadni cu dasni lo mapku gi'e sruri lo dinju
  10 of 50 students wore hats and surrounded a building.


Regardless, this isn't the explanation that I've been repeatedly asking for:

Bunch, individually: We are not treating Alice this way, so this does
not apply. (If this were the hat example: Alice, herself, wears one+
of the bunch of hats implied by the blank inner of {lo mapku})

Bunch, together (but not in the sense of mass or group): Alice's
relationship to the surrounding of the building is ???

What is the difference between the latter two relationships?


I'm not sure I understand the question yet. Let's see:

    (1a) ro le tadni cu dasni lo mapku
    (1b) la alis me le tadni
=> (1c) la alis cu dasni lo mapku

    (2a) lu'o le tadni cu sruri lo dinju
    (2b) la alis me le tadni
=> (2c) la alis kansa le drata tadni lo nu sruri lo dinju

    (3a) le tadni cu broda
    (3b) la alis me le tadni
=> (3c) la alis ?

Is that your question? What can I say about Alice knowing that she is
one of the students and knowing that the students are/do something, but
not knowing whether the something is predicated distributively or
collectively? The answer is: nothing.  From (3a) and (3b) there is nothing
similar to (1c) or (2c) that I can conclude. Perhaps If I knew what {broda}
was, I could make a fairly good guess as to whether in (3a) the predicate is
meant distributively or collectively (or in some other way, see example
below), and conclude accordingly about Alice, but without any markings,
I cannot answer, just as I cannot answer whether the brodaing is meant to
be happening now, in the past, or in the future (though again, with context I
might be able to make a good guess).

Consider another example:

    le pa no nanla cu bevri le pa no stizu le purdi
    "The ten boys took the ten chairs to the garden."

Now how could that be done? In many different ways:

(1) Each boy took one chair.
(2) Five boys took one chair each, one boy took two chairs, and the three
    remaining boys took the last chair (a very heavy one perhaps).
(3) All the boys together took all the chairs together (all stacked pehaps).
(4) Many other combinations.

We could, of course, say exactly how the boys distributed the chairs among
themselves, but we may not need to. Maybe all we want is to say that the boys
took the chairs to the garden, and the details of how they did it are irrelevant
to us. Why should we be forced to spell everything out in painful detail?
Furthermore, if {le nanla} is to be interpreted as {ro le nanla} and
{le stizu} as
{ro le stizu}, we get that the simplest form {le nanla cu bevri le
stizu le purdi}
results in one very unlikely claim, that each of the boys took each of
the chairs
to the garden. (If we wanted to say that, it is very easy to add the {ro},
but having the {ro} there by default is just very inconvenient.)



> It's interesting to note that while Lojban has gadri corresponding to the
> {joi}-connective, it has no gadri corresponding to the {fa'u}-connective, so
> to get the "respectively" reading fully explicited you have to duplicate
> the sentence:
>
>  ro le tadni cu dasni pa le mapku ije ro re mapku cu se dasni pa le tadni

ro ri mapku, yes.


You probably mean {ro lo ri mapku}.
{ro ri mapku} means "each of them is a hat".

But notice that {ro le tadni cu dasni ro le ri mapku} does not say that for
each hat there was a student that wore it, nor that the students didn't
share hats.

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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