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 7:36:16 PM
Subject: 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.

[So they were wearing red caps when they surrounded the building.  All of them?  Were there some red-capped students not involved in surrounding the building?

> 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?

[[Well, this may be a flaw in logic, but it likes clearcut answers at this level.  We need to be able to look at the referents of a term and tell whether it satisfies the predicate.  "the surrounded the building" means more that some were here and some were there and some others were over yonder, it requires some unification.  So also, lifting a piano requires some unification -- and there is no unification in the solution you give you give: three guys do something over here, three others something over there, and so on.]]

> 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.)

[[Always getting back to this same problem: What the Hell does 'lo broda' mean?  Saying over and over again that it doesn't mean anything does not make it any clearer.   And remember that the ciurent problem is not about what 'lo broda'' means or hiow it works but how the thing in it broda.]]

To reiterate the definitions for the 100th time:

  lo broda = zo'e noi ke'a broda

(nothing here about how the referents are distributed)

[[As far as I can tell, nothing here about the referents at all; that is, I have no idea what 'zo'e' refers to or even if it is a referring expression.  It doesn't look like a name but it doesn't behave like a bound variable.  And, in either case, it doesn't do what it seems to be wanted to do here.  I suppose it might be like 'le broda' an externally bound variable, but that hardly helps explain what 'lo broda' (which is an internally bound variable) does.]]

  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?

[[I would say that the children collectively carried the chairs to the garden, which doesn't go into who carried what or even if every child actually participated -- that's how it works with teams and similar things which are presumably models for this sort of talk.  If we had more information, we could be more precise, if it were relevant.  Similarly, when we say that people surrounded the building, we don't need to specify exactly where each one stood.  In short, I am agreeing with you about the facts but puzzled by your interpretation of them.  Of course, this case is helped by the object being as multiple as the subject, so are further held back from going into details.  In any case, it is quite clear how the children are children and the chairs chairs, but it is not clear how the piano-carriers are piano carriers.]]

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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