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Re: [lojban] About plural 'ro'
On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 8:57 PM, John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com> wrote:
> From: Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>
>
> 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?
No, it's not marked at all, at least not by anything other than our
general knowledge of the world. I just picked an example where context
would make it relatively clear how things were distributed. It's
unlikely, but not logically impossible that they were all wearing a
cap together, or maybe they just took turns wearing one cap, and it's
unlikely, but not logically impossible that each of them surrounds the
building. Maybe it's a small toy building. In some other example:
lo verba pu bevri lo stuzi lo purdi
"The children carried the chairs to the garden."
We have no idea whether each child carried one chair, each pair of
children carried one, they all carried each chair together, some of
them carried one chair while others carried one heavy chair together,
etc. If that information is relevant, we will have to supply it by
some other means than by the gadri.
> I thought that was the gadri's job (together with quantifiers perhaps).
No, and it shouldn't be. The distributional possibilities are so
immense that having specialized gadri for each one would be madness.
> 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, ]
"lo tadni" means the same thing in both sentences, of course.
> 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?
Yes.
> 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.
Why not in pairs? Or in threes? Or in pairs and threes? Or ...? What
makes the two extreme cases the only choices?
> 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.]
Of course not, only if one broda today and the other also broda today
can you say that the two broda today.
> [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.]
Was that your standard line? Mine has been that "ro lo broda cu brode"
is distributive, while "lo broda" is unspecified for distribution.
(And please don't say that this is new, I've been telling you this for
ages, don't make me go look for old posts where we discussed this over
and over again.)
To reiterate the definitions for the 100th time:
lo broda = zo'e noi ke'a broda
(nothing here about how the referents are distributed)
ro lo broda cu brode = ro da poi ke'a me lo broda zo'u da brode
(keeping in mind that "ro" is singular)
> 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
It's very useful actually.
> (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).]
OK, tell me how would you say "the children carried the chairs to the
garden". We don't know how they did it, because when we arrived they
were already finished. How would you say it with your useful
obligatory distinctions?
mu'o mi'e xorxes
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