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Re: [lojban] {zo'e} as close-scope existentially quantified plural variable

John E. Clifford, On 21/10/2011 20:26:

? because any number attached to {djacu} would be wrong; there would
be both more and fewer quantities of water involved(aside from the
case of deionized molecules, say)?


Yes.


I don't think that is in keeping
with Lojban thinking, which would take the number to be the number of
separate puddles or whatever.


One presumes that the criteria for individuating apples are specified in the semanticon entry for {plise}, since these criteria are intrinsic to the definition of applehood. But is the same true for {djacu} -- that the semanticon specifies precisely what does and does not count as a single amount of water, and that for any distribution of water, these criteria will yield only one possible cardinality for the quantity of amounts of water in that distribution?


Internal quantifier in descriptions
would be more problematic, since you might usually be able to get
more bits out than the quantifier says were in. I am inclined to
think that not having mass nouns was a mistake, except that the logic
of them was so poorly worked out back then (and has bad gaps even
now). This does not seem to me to be a reason to shift over -- to get
back to something like the stated topic -- to like massy things like
kinds or whatever.


I'm not yet convinced that {djacu} is not a mass noun. But anyway, as I said in an earlier reply to you when you made the same point, even if no gismu is a mass noun, nothing (afaik) precludes another brivla or cmene from being a mass noun, so Lojban does have mass nouns.

Obviously by "having mass noun", you and I mean sumti (places) thathave mass-noun-like semantics.

--And.



Sent from my iPad

On Oct 21, 2011, at 14:09, And Rosta<and.rosta@gmail.com>  wrote:


John E. Clifford, On 21/10/2011 19:00:

Sorry, I seem to have missed the point.  I took the failure of {su'o djacu} to be because  "at least one" did not get to the minimum possibility, hence the need to go to "more than zero".  But that was me getting mixed up in the surrounding talk about{pi} and {lo}.


No, I did say that as an afterthought, and I was wrong. {su'o djacu} does work. What doesn't work is any specific cardinal other than ci'i. So {pa djacu} and {re djacu} fail, by the Goatleg rule, which says that bare PA means "exactly PA, no more and no less".

--And.



Sent from my iPad

On Oct 21, 2011, at 12:53, And Rosta<and.rosta@gmail.com>   wrote:


John E Clifford, On 21/10/2011 16:35:

I don't see why; {djacu} is as quantized as every other Lojban predicate.


You don't agree that half an amount of water is also an amount of water?

--And.





----- Original Message ----
From: And Rosta<and.rosta@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Fri, October 21, 2011 6:52:09 AM
Subject: Re: [lojban] {zo'e} as close-scope existentially quantified plural
variable

Martin Bays, On 21/10/2011 05:12:

* Thursday, 2011-10-20 at 23:25 -0400 - Pierre Abbat<phma@phma.optus.nu>:


On Thursday 20 October 2011 22:06:58 And Rosta wrote:

When I was last up-to-date with developments, nothing was official, but I
think I can recall the rudiments of our best efforts at that time to
construct a consistent and rational gadri system. As far as I now recall,
"half an apple" would be "lo pi mu plise", while "pi mu lo plise" would be
the "one in every two apples" one.


If "pimu lo plise" means "one in every two apples", then "pa lo plise" should
mean "every apple". I think "lo pimu plise" is "a half apple"


But {lo PA broda cu broda} is meant to be a tautology. Half-apples
aren't apples.


So {lo pi mu plise cu plise} fails that test, but {lo pi mu djacu cu djacu}
passes it.

Following a line of thought that that observation initiates, I note that by the
Goatleg rule, {su'o plise} is okay but {su'o djacu} is not and would instead
have to be {za'u djacu} or {ci'i djacu}.

--And.



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