Re: [lojban] About plural 'ro'

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 1:26 PM, John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com> wrote:
> To take a case in point 'lo bevri be lo plano' (where did we get that word?)

It's "lo pipno", BTW. Or maybe you meant "lo plana": "the fat one".

> refers to several things or a bunch.  Now the things, which must be things that carry a piano, turn out in the hypothetical case we are looking at, to be pluralities or bunches (it takes at least three of the five participants to carry the piano). So, then, what satisfies 'me lo bevri be lo plano'?  What is obviously there are the sixteen groups, whether bunches or just pluralities, of three or more participants.  xorxes apparently is claiming that the right answer is just the three participants themselves,

Indeed. Three, four or five, depending on the occasion.

> in spite of the fact that they don't satisfy the defining predicate.

But they do. Together. Each of them doesn't. Together, they do.

> I suppose
>  you could claim that, since each of these groups satisfies the predicate, then the things that satisfy the predicate is the union of these, which would, in fact reduce the group of participants.  But this looks perilous: though I can't come up with a good case where it is clearly wrong, I also can't prove that it is correct.  One attempt along this line might be to consider that, while all the threesomes and foursomes actually carried the piano, the fivesome did not.  The union would be the same, but the referent of the term would again be a plurality that did not in fact meet the property (and, in general, the fact that something unioned in has a property does not mean that the union does). , On the other hand, what xorxes pulls out is the right thing for the case and the question then is, where did he get it.

The referentS of the term (not the referent, because the term has more
than one referent) vary from occasion to occasion of carrying. Just
like John may have a beard one day and not the next, the carriers of
the piano may be four at some point and three at some other point, and
a different three at another. Or they may be five, who took turns in
carrying the piano in such way that at no point were they all carrying
it together. There is no need to encode all that precision in a poor
little gadri. If you want to talk about the ones that were carriers at
10:25 a.m., then you will have to say "the carriers of the piano at
10:25 a.m.", we can't have an "all together" gadri, and a "one by one"
gadri, and an "in groups of 3, 4 and 5" gadri and an "at 10:25 a.m."
gadri. All that, when needed, has to be added by other means.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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