Re: [lojban] Re: Cake, Pie or Ice Cream?

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 8:35 AM, Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder
- LLG <lojbab@lojban.org> wrote:
> John E Clifford wrote:
>
>> The 'ji' solution to the choice question is very Logjamish; it is easy to
>> picture JCB cackling with glee over it.  But it raises (not "begs"
>> gawdammit) some further questions, all of which have been raised before and
>> probably solved.  But, I don't remember the solutions and they may not be in
>> the consciousness of many less-than-decades Lojbanists:
>> 1.  What is the question to which "cream", "sugar, "neither" or "both" are
>> *answers*, not merely side remarks that happen to do the job answers are
>> meant to do?

The one I prefer is:

 lo kruji lo sukta zo'u do djica ma
 "Cream, sugar: you want what?"

The answers "lo kruji", "lo sukta", "noda", "roda". And if you want to
be less than helpful: "pada", "su'oda", "me'ida", and so on.

>> 2) How does (or indeed, just "Does") the 'ji' solution extend to cases of
>> three or more choice items, as in the subject line?
>> 3) What about extending the solution to 1 above to more than two cases?
>
> You asked me 2) and 3) way back in 1987-1988 when we were just starting on
> the redesign.  I recall you had calculated just how many answers would be
> needed for 3 terms, and 4 terms, and how many of them could be covered by
> TLI Loglan constructs.

The helpful answers can all be covered with "... (na).e(nai) ...
.e(nai) ... .e(nai) ... ..."

> We devised a solution, which no one else seems to have mentioned.  That
> solution was eventually generalized in a different sense, so I am not
> surprised that it was forgotten.
>
> The solution avoided ji altogether, and asked for selection from a set with
> members specified by lu'i/lu'u.  More complex cases could be specified with
> multiple set expressions (any 2 of set A) union (any 1 of set B).

You don't spell out the solution. Presumably it was something like:

  do djica ma poi cmima ... ce ... ce ... ce ...

But you don't really need to use sets, you could also say:

  do djica ma poi me ... .a ... .a ... .a ...

> I remember playing with trying to devise questions that might actually
> arise, that would use multiple sets, and then realized that we have "Pick 2
> from column A and 1 from column B) as something that does arise in English.

Example?

> Now that lu'i has been generalized into a series that serves as a
> set/mass/individual/pointer converter, I suspect that there is a lot more
> power in the construct than even I dreamed of.  But I don't remember how
> much of what we were thinking of in 1988 made it into CLL in 1997.

You're probably thinking of "lu'a" rather than "lu'i".

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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