Re: [lojban] About plural 'ro'

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

----- Original Message ----
From: Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Thu, April 22, 2010 4:34:48 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] About plural 'ro'

On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 11:44 AM, And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> If every possibly combination of individuals constitutes a
> group/bunch/set/collectivity, so that there is no doubt over the
> definitiion, is it necessary, and is it advantageous, to invoke plural
> quantification/predication?

Plural reference is useful to say things like:

    lo tadni cu dasni lo xunre mapku gi'e sruri lo dinju
    "The students wore red caps and surrounded the building."

With groups instead of plural reference, we would have to split the
claim into two: each student (not the group) wore red caps, and the
group (not each student) surrounded the building.

[And you don't have to do that with plural reference because....?  'dasni' is marked for taking its subjects singularly, while 'sruri' is marked for collective?  I thought that was the gadri's job (together with quantifiers perhaps).  From what you said elsewhere just now (I'm doing these backwards apparently), there seems to be no guarantee that the students who wore red caps and the ones who surrounded the building are exactly the same -- or even partially, for that matter: 'lo tadni' has different referents at different times".  But that, of course, violates a basic rule of sentence collapsing: you can't collapse ab & ac into
 a (b&c), if a means different things in the two original sentences,  ]

Or else, change one of the predicates to something like "participated
in the surrounding of the building", or "has members each of which
wore red hats". That's less appealing than just saying of the students
that they wear hats and that they (the same students that wear the
hats) surround the building.

[But apparently you haven't said that yet.]

For that, we only need plural reference, not plural quantification.
According to pc, we can't have plural reference without plural
quantification. I don't have a problem with introducing let's say
"ro'oi" and "su'oi" for the plural universal and existential
quantifiers. As long as we leave "ro" and "su'o" for the usual
singular ones, which are the ones most often needed.

That's the case for plural reference.

A second issue, completely separate from the above, is the meaning of
an expression like:

    ro <sumti> cu broda

given that "ro" is the singular universal quantifier, and <sumti> is a
term with plural reference.

Now, a quantifier needs a domain of quantification. A term with plural
reference has a number of referents. What to do?

I know! Let's use the set of referents of the sumti as the domain of
quantification for the quantifier! (What else?)

But what if instead of a singular quantifier, we have a plural quantifier:

    ro'oi <sumti> cu broda

Now, a plural quantifier also needs a domain of quantification. Again,
we note that a term with plural reference has a number of referents.
What to do? How about... let's use the set of referents of the sumti
as the domain of quantification for the plural quantifier!

[But the question seems to be, where did those referents come from? They don'r necessarily satisfy the predicate in the description -- to stick to the problematic case  -- either collectively or individually, yet there they are.  Are all descriptions just 'le' then?]


Now comes a third issue, independent of the other two issues.

We know (or at least don't argue much about) how sumti such as ti, ta,
tu, mi, do, ri, ra, ko'a, di'u, etc. get their referents, which can be
one or many. But how does a sumti like "lo broda" get its referents?

No matter how it gets them, we know that they must satisfy the broda
predicate, i.e. "lo broda cu broda". Is it necessary that each of the
referents satisfy the predicate? No. Is it necessary that they satisfy
it all collectively? No. Is it necessary that they satisfy it in
groups of seven? No. In groups of varying numbers? No, that's not
necessary either. All that is required is that its referents must
satisfy the predicate "broda", in whatever arrangement they do it,
i.e. "lo broda" = "zo'e noi ke'a broda", it is a sumti whose
referent(s) satisfy the predicate broda.

[Whoooooa!  They don't have to satisfy the predicate in an preestablished way, but they do have to satisfy it in some way.  Any old way will do?  But that is not what the notion of a description -- or the relevant sense of satisfaction -- is about.  With plural referents you have basically two choice -- individually, each of them is a broda, or collectively, all of them broda together.  Since these are either just things or L-sets of things, you can't even say that abc broda and def broda, therefore abcdef broda.  We can't take the fact that one thing brodaes yesterday and another tomorrow and combine them to say that the two are in lo broda today.]

When we need to specify how exactly the referents of "lo broda" broda,
we have to do it by some other means, because "lo broda" by itself
doesn't say. Similarly, in "lo broda cu brode", when we need to
specify how exactly the referents of "lo broda" brode, we need to do
it in some other way, because neither "lo broda" nor "brode" do it.

[So the standard line that 'lo broda' talks about brodaers collectively and 'ro lo broda' talks about them individually is out, as is the assignment of places to be collective or singular.]

What means do we have at our disposal? One is the singular universal
quantifier "ro":

     ro lo tadni cu dasni lo xunre mapku
     "Each one of the students wears a red cap."

What about the surrounding of the building? Well, we could say, for example:

     pa djine be lo tadni cu sruri lo dinju
     "One ring of students surrounded the building."

Or:

     ci djine be lo tadni cu sruri lo dinju
     "Three rings of students surrounded the building."

After all, there are many different configurations in which the
students could surround the building together. If we are not too
concerned about the exact configuration, but we still want to insist
that they did it as a group (in case that's not obvious from the
context), we could say:

     lo gunma be lo tadni cu sruri lo dinju
     "A group of students surrounded the building."

As someone once said, the price of infinite precision is infinite verbosity.

{But this is doing away with a useful precision for not apparent reason at all -- except perhaps your still mysterious notion that 'lo' is a totally content neutral term maker, which also seems pretty pointless (Lord lnows we have enough totally neutral terms already, we don't need more and especially we don't need ones that seem to be doing something useful).]
mu'o mi'e xorxes

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