[lojban] About plural 'ro'

[John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>]

On nth thought, I am not so sure that plural 'ro' is such a problem after all.  To be sure, if we say 'ro da broda' we get the wrong result if brodaing is something that only inidividuals can do.  But we rarely say that; most universals are qualified (whether restricted or conditional) and the qualification simply weeds out the inappropriate things. 'ro da poi broda cu brode'  deals only with things that broda and thus only with things we really want to deal with, including -- if apt -- pluralities.  And the same applies, by a different mechanism, to 'ro da ganai da broda gi da brode'.  Did we want to generalize only about individuals, we could stick in -- for these rare occasions -- the appropriate filter.  Of course, this requires some notion of what applies to individuals (or groups of any selected size only) and that is open to some debate.  The example was of friends and it might be argued that "is a friend of" can take pluralities in both slots. 
 But it can equally well be argued that it is individual in both slots and that the group possibilities is a summing of the individuals (a notion which would surely have some place in any developed theory of plurality, the flip side of "participation", say).  That all needs to be spelled out in the strict definition in Lojban, of course.  But, once it is done, I think that virtually all the problems with taking 'ro' as plural diminish to irrelevance.


      

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