Re: [lojban] xorlo and masses

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 11:03 AM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:
>
> OK. Given the clarifications above to the effect that plural predication
> should be limited and fairly rare, I think I can see this working - and
> generally the ambiguity in allowing collective satisfaction in {lo
> broda} being acceptable.

I'm not sure I agree that collective predication is rare. For
predicates that respond to English nouns, yes, it should be rare, but
for predicates that respond to verbs/adjectives, I think it should be
fairly common. Now in the case of "lo broda", "broda" is likely to be
a nounish type of predicate, so I do agree that for "lo broda", the
typical case will be distributive satisfaction of "broda". But for the
main selbri of a bridi, the typical case will be a verb/adjective type
of predicate, and for those I think collective predication is
relatively common.

> But if we accept the rule discussed below that if G is the group whose
> set of constituents is equal to set of referents of {ko'a} then the
> individual G satisfies broda iff {ko'a broda} holds,

"if {ko'a broda} holds collectively", right?

> and accept that
> such groups are individuals in our universe, then singular
> quantification would effectively include plural quantification...

You may be able to say everything with singular quantification, but it
takes more effort.

Say "ro'oi" is the plural universal quantifier. Then with plural
quantification you can say:

ro'oi da poi prenu zo'u da su'o roi nonkansa
"For every person/people X, X was/were alone at least once".

 With singular quantification only:

ro da poi su'o de poi prenu zo'u ge de cmima da gi no di poi na prenu
zo'u di cmima da zo'u da su'o roi nonkansa
"For every X such that for some person x, x is a member of X and for
no non-person y, y is a member of X, X was alone at least once."

I'm not sure that "every group of people" can be said more concisely
with singular predication only.

(Admittedly the plural quantification case is still missing the
indication that "prenu" is to be taken distributively and "nonkansa"
is to be taken collectively, which you don't need in the singular
quantification case because there there is no distinction between
distributive and collective, since variables are always singular.)

>> Even things like "lo ci prenu cu pa mei" can be read collectively (as
>> in "lo ci prenu cu pa mei lo bende").
>
> What are you getting at here, sorry?

I don't remember, but "lo ci prenu cu pa mei lo bende" has two
readings, depending on whether the x1 of "pa mei" is read
distributively or collectively: The three people are one team each, or
the three people are one team together. The collective reading is the
natural one, since "PA mei" has strong affinity for a collective
reading of its x1.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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