IIRC 'zo'u' is a colon. It doesn't quantify anything; it just separates the the prenex quantifiers from the body of the bridi. It also serves to separate out out things one might want to put up front, like topics (and, occasionally, temporals and spatials and a bunch of other stuff to make some logical point)
The 'bu'a' series of variables can't be moved inward (having something to move across is another job for 'zo'u') because there is no legal way to write 'ro bu'a' in the selbri slot of a bridi -- and have any hope of getting all the other quantifiers coming out clear (there are logical reasons as well as practical, such expressions are moving up a level in expressions and mixing levels has to be done carefully, if at all) But the, I don't quite know what you mean by
indefinite descriptions involving predicate variables: 'lo bu'a'?
There actually were an array of suggestions for dealing with "predicates as predicates" but since it was unclear what you wanted, it was hard to pick a suitable one. Have you gotten clearer about that.
I also don't quite see what all this has to do with self-reference, which generally is an evil thing that all manner of problems in the 2oth cnetury and eventually provided the unwelcome solution that there was no solution to them.
From: Luke Bergen <lukeabergen@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Fri, December
3, 2010 3:32:33 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] zo'u is inconsistent
I've kind of wondered about zo'u myself with regards to this.
More interestingly for me though, what in the hell does "se xu" mean?
On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 4:00 PM, Ian Johnson
<blindbravado@gmail.com> wrote:
{zo'u} works like this if I understand correctly:
PA da PA de ... zo'u -> quantifying da de ...
PA bu'a PA bu'e ... zo'u -> quantifying bu'a bu'e ...
<any other sumti> zo'u -> defining the topic in an imprecisely defined sense
In any case, you put a string of sumti before it. In one case, doing this quantifies over sumti. In another case, it quantifies over selbri. In still another case, it doesn't quantify over ANYTHING.
.i la'e di'u .e la'e di'u xi re na se nibli .i la'e lo'u ro da le'u .e la'e lo'u ro bu'a le'u cu sumti .i to se xu toi ni'ibo lo'u ro bu'a zo'u le'u cmacrkuantifi lo'i sumti .enai lo'i selbri
What is especially egregious is:
However, indefinite descriptions involving the
bu'a-series cannot be imported from the prenex.
(CLL 16.13)
which to me sounds like "there's magic going on here, so what happens every other time is forbidden in this specific case."
My general thought about this is that it's awkward because the language doesn't have very strong self-referential tools for things like referring to predicates as predicates. I asked recently about how to refer to "broda-as-predicate" and was given {la'e zo broda}; I don't know if that's really adequate for things like quantification over selbri variables and so on.
Any thoughts; disagreements, ideas for improvement, etc.?
mu'o mi'e .latros.
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