* Saturday, 2011-10-15 at 15:08 -0300 - Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>:
> On Sat, Oct 15, 2011 at 12:50 PM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:
> > * Saturday, 2011-10-15 at 12:16 -0300 - Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>:
> >
> >> >> {ro te cange poi ponse lo xasli cu darxi ri}
> >
> >> I would say the Lojban is meaningful and (roughly) equivalent to
> >> "every farmer who is a donkey-owner is a donkey-beater".
> >
> > i.e. equivalent to {ro te cange poi ponse lo xasli cu darxi lo xasli}?
>
> Not exactly, because we have no guarantee that the first "lo xasli"
> and the second "lo xasli" will always have the same referent.
Ah, of course, you have the first {lo xasli} having the same referent
for all farmers, namely the kind 'donkeys'. Yes? And then the {ri} has
this kind as its referent, and then you declare that kinds in x2 of
ponse and darxi resolve existentially, and context ensures that for
a given farmer the glorked domain of the existential quantification in
the darxi part is the set of donkeys that farmer owns.
Is that accurate?
Actually, can I take the opportunity to ask a crucial question I don't
think I yet directly have: is the use of kinds necessary for you to get
the forall-exists meaning of {ro te cange cu ponse lo xasli}, or would
you allow the {lo xasli} to give a Skolem function with domain the set
of farmers and values (mundane) donkeys? How about in {ro te cange poi
ponse lo xasli cu broda}?
(of course, mundane-valued Skolem functions wouldn't help with giving
the not-forall-exists meaning of {ro te cange cu na ponse lo xasli}
which kinds give)
> > It still leaves super-donkey sentences like {su'o da poi te cange cu
> > ponse lo xasli noi da darxi .i ri se kecti mi}, where simply copying the
> > {lo} with its relative clause to the second sentence would give an
> > unbound {da}. Assigning no meaning to such expressions seems reasonable.
>
> "ri" does not copy words, so I don't see any major problem with that
> sentence, at least if you leave it with "noi". With "poi" it would get
> trickier.
Ah. Maybe you don't handle {noi} on {lo} as I expected. I was assuming:
{lo xasli noi da darxi}
== {zo'e noi xasli zi'e noi da darxi}
== {zo'e noi xasli gi'e se darxi da}
~= {lo xasli je se darxi be da}
such that you can't have a referent constant with respect to {da}, and
hence the {ri} (being outside of the scope of {da}) doesn't have any
referent.
Martin
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