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

["Maxim Katcharov" <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

On 6/5/06, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

So lo has a default outer {ro}? Because otherwise something like {lo
pano lo muno tadni} says "some number of 10 of 50 students".

Additionally, I don't think that a double lo is sensible. {pa lo re lo
ci tadni} says the same thing as {pa lo ci tadni}.

> > 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

There are three variants: mass, bunch-together, bunch-individually.
{lu'o} is specific in that it means "mass".

 { lu'o le tadni cu sruri lo dinju }

translates to

 { lo gunma be le tadni cu sruri lo dinju }

or perhaps even

 { [da poi sruri lo dinju] cu gunma [le tadni] }
 (which I suspect you may like)

because it's the mass interpretation. {le tadni} is ambiguous, but
we'll assume that it's definitely the "bunch-together"
interpretation... which I guess is loi? Perhaps you don't have "mass
of" in this pluralist view at all? Anyway, something like

 { lei tadni cu sruri lo dinju }

is what we're getting at. (2c) would be your translation of this.
However, it doesn't say what you seem to want it to say.

 [alice] is accompanied by [the other students] in [the event of (the
students) surrounding the building]

Something like (1c) {la alis cu dasni lo mapku} provides a definite
link between Alice and the sumti-slot, which lets us know her exact
relationship to the students and to the surroundment of the building.
(2c), however, is suggestive at best. Consider:

(4a) lo tadni cu sruri lo tadni
(4c) la alis kansa le drata tadni lo nu sruri lo tadni
(4d) [alice] is accompanied by [the other students] in [the event of
(the students) surrounding the students]

Where is the relationship? Is Alice a surrounder, or one of the
surrounded? There's no definite indication.

So again, I ask you, what is the relationship between Alice and the
sumti-slot, the students who surround the building, the surroundment
of the building?

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

My question is: you have the pluralist view, and it has an ambiguous
{le tadni}, which could mean one of two things in any particular sumti
slot. First, it could mean "distributively" (bunch-individually), as
in "the students wore hats". Second, it could mean
"non-distributively" (bunch-together), as in "the students surround
the building". If the difference between the two has nothing to do
with "mass", then what is the difference?

> 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?

I don't think Alice knowing anything has anything to do with this. I
don't care what Alice knows, I care how she fits into the
relationship.

> 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).

A bit beside the point, but what would you look for as an indicator
that it is one and not the other?

> 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).

It's enough to say that the group of boys took the group of chairs,
because it'll probably be your choice to see it in that way
(regardless of how who did what). If you want to be explicit about it,
you can just write it out in Lojban as you did here in English.

> (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?

You aren't. Painful detail would be writing (2) out in full when you
don't want to.

> 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.)

I lean more towards an outer {su'o} than an outer {ro}.

> > > 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".

You said {ije... ro re}, "all two". I assumed that you made a typo,
and meant something like "and those hats in the last sentence, each is
worn by a student"

> 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.


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