[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

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

On 6/8/06, Maxim Katcharov <maxim.katcharov@gmail.com> wrote:

On 6/8/06, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:
> Suppose Alice and Betty are the only students
> in the group, and the rest of the people surrounding the building are
> professors, is "Students surround the building" true?

Yes, it becomes much more apparent (to me, at least) once written out
in Lojban. It's not {la alis cu sruri lo dinju}, it's {lu'o la alis cu
sruri dinju}.


My understanding of our disagreement so far had been as follows:

(1) loi tadni cu sruri le dinju
(2) lu'o lo tadni cu sruri le dinju
(3) lo tadni cu sruri le dinju

We both agreed (I thought) in which situations (1) would be true and
in which situations it would be false. We both agreed that {loi} could
be decomposed as {lu'o lo}, so that (2) says the same as (1). We
disagreed on whether the {lu'o} component could be optionally omitted.
I held that {lu'o} was optional, and so could be dropped when context
made it unnecessary, as in the example of students surrounding a
building, and you held that {lu'o} could not be dropped because if it
was dropped the predicate {sruri} had to be necessarily taken as
distributive.

But now the disagreement seems to occur at an earlier step.
We no longer seem to agree about the meaning of (1). For example,
if there is a chain of rocks around the building, with a gap filled by
Alice, who is a student, you would say that (1) is true and I would
say it is false. For me it is false because it is not the case that
students surround the building in that case. For you it is true because
it is the case that a group of things that includes at least one student
surrounds the building.

Do we at least agree on what we disagree about?

mu'o mi'e xorxes


To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to lojban-list-request@lojban.org
with the subject unsubscribe, or go to http://www.lojban.org/lsg2/, or if
you're really stuck, send mail to secretary@lojban.org for help.