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

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 5:09 PM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:
>
> Ah, so you meant something like the minimum *convex* volume containing
> them all?
>
> Still pretty icky.

Forget I said minimum then, just some volume that contains them, not
too much larger than the minimum.

"Those three lions we were talking about are now at the zoo" sounds
normal enough to me.

>> If I were pointing at your spleen, I should probably say "bu'u ta".
>
> Even if you were touching it?

Probably, unless I'm talking to someone else, not to you. The ti/ta/tu
distinction is supposed to be "close to me"/"close to you"/"away from
you and me", and any part of your body is more likely to be closer to
you than to me.

>> But I agree it is a matter better left to philosophers, which is to
>> say that there is no single right answer. Same thing would happen if I
>> asked you when you remna. Did you remna yesterday and remna again
>> today, or is there just one long when that you remna in?
>
> Hmm, there I would be inclined to answer definitively that I remna
> continuously.

But "continuously" could mean "at each point in the interval" or "on
the interval as a whole". In one case you remna an infinite number of
times, in the other case just once. Similarly the lions may lion many
times (in many places) or just once, in one place.

>> I obviously would say that the tautology is "lo vi cinfo cu vi cinfo",
>> which of course does not exclude the (non-tautological) possibility
>> that "lo vi cinfo cu vu ji'a cinfo".
>
> Huh. So {lo vi cinfo} just means (ignoring kinds) "some lions at least
> one of which is here",

But I wasn't ignoring kinds! "lo vi cinfo" for me is just "the lions
here". In some contexts "the lions here" are the same lions that are
over there, in other contexts they are not. If they are not the same
lions there, then they are not there.

> and you'd have to say {lo cinfo poi ro ke'a vi
> zvati} to mean "some lions here"?

"some lions here" would have to be "su'o vi cinfo".

> If common predicates like {vi cinfo} are non-distributive, are you still
> sure it's best to have {lo} work this way? If so, could you explain why?

By "non-distributive" you mean "not necessarily distributive" or
"necessarily non-distributive"?

In general, I would say that "vi broda" is not necessarily disributive
over the referents of "lo vi broda".

In the case of "vi cinfo", I would say it does distribute over the
referents of "lo vi cinfo". So I would say "ro lo vi cinfo cu vi
cinfo" is probably true. (But ro lo vi broda cu vi broda" need not
be.) Our disagreement is not about distributivity, we would still have
it even if we were talking about a single lion. I don't have a problem
with "They have this lion in the Bronx Zoo too", but you probably
would object. (Or rather you may say that it resolves into something
else, and that "this lion" does not refer to a lion, as it appears to
do at first sight.)

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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