Re: [lojban] xorlo and masses

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:
>
> One issue with this approach, though (and maybe this is what you
> meant, actually?) is that quantification only makes sense when we have
> an idea of what atoms are relevant. So in {lo broda ro ri brode}, {ri}
> would have to carry as information not only what Whole which {lo
> broda} refers to, but also that quantification of it is to be taken
> with respect to broda-atoms.

What I meant was that it is "brode", not "ri", that needs to carry
that information.

> That's conceptually slightly ugly, and I don't know how intuitive it
> would be.
>
> (Example of use: in the context of people carrying tables,
> {re lo bevri be su'o jubme cu ci mei .i pa ra verba}
> would mean that two of the tables are being carried by threesomes, and
> one of the tables is being carried by a group which consists entirely
> of children.

I'm not sure I see that that follows. "ra" should have the same
referents as "lo bevri be su'o jubme". The natural distribution of
"verba" is over people, so I would interpret "pa ra verba" as saying
that one of the carriers of tables is a child, with no information as
to whether the child is in one of the two threesomes. But that's only
assuming the most natural distribution of "verba". You are assuming
that from the context the natural distribution shifts from prenu to
"cimei [be lo prenu]", and further that the referents of "ra" are not
the same referents of "lo bevri be su'o jubme" but those of "lo bevri
be su'o jubme be'o poi ci mei [be lo prenu]".

> Assuming {bevri} is distributive in x2 with respect to tables, {lo
> prenu cu bevri lo jubme} would accurately describe the situation, and
> {ro lo prenu cu bevri lo jubme} would be false.)

Right, but it is not a general property of "bevri" that it is
distributive in x2 with respect to tables. In some other context we
may need that it not fully distribute with respect to tables. What I
was getting at is that it is not generally part of the meaning of a
predicate how it distributes in any of its arguments with respect to
other predicates, although in a lot of cases there is an obvious
natural choice. (We could try to define predicates in such a way that
how they distribute with respect to other predicates is always
determined, but I don't think it would work from a practical usage
point of view.)

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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