Re: 3 dogs, 2 men, many arguments

["Jorge Llambias" <jjllambias@hotmail.com>]

la xod cusku di'e

>The Lojban bridi is a statement made "from infinity", a clear description 
>of fact from a 3rd party perspective. All Lojban utterances are this way, 
>except ones with prenexes containing terms of different "scope"! Those are
>the only bridi that violate that fact that "da broda de" implies "de se 
>broda da".

"da broda de" does mean the same as "de se broda da",
they mean the same as "da de zo'u da broda de" or
"de da zo'u da broda de". Remember that the default
quantifier for da is su'o (at least one), and the
order of two variables quantified by su'o is
always irrelevant.

But "ro da broda de" is not the same as
"de se broda ro da". The first one is
"ro da de zo'u da broda de", and the second one
is "de ro da zo'u da broda de".

What you are arguing is that they both should mean
"de ro da zo'u da broda de". In other words, you
want that when the variables are not explicitly
quatified in the prenex, their quantification
should be existentials first, universals second.

That was a possible way of choosing how to
interpret sentences without an explicit prenex,
but it is not what was decided. The chosen
interpretation was to export to the prenex
in the same order that the quantifiers appear
in the sentence. The advantage of this is that
you don't have to use the prenex as often as
you would with the other scheme.

>This is an affront to my Lojbanic intuition and aesthetic.

I know the feeling. I don't agree with you about
this particular affront, but lots of other times
I have argued along those lines, usually (but not
always) unsuccessfully.

>Consider an alternative scheme: mappings.
>
>The prenex is constructed like: (set definition 1) (mapping) (set
>definition 2) (mapping) ... (set definition m) zo'u bridi
>
>where a set definition is a da poi phrase, and a mapping
>specifies the topology of the relationship between the sets, such as 1:1,
>cross product, at least one, unknown, etc.

What you call mapping, at least in some cases, is the
job of the quantifier. The quantifier is not a part
of the set definition.

co'o mi'e xorxes