Re: [lojban] "Any" and {ro}

On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 9:08 AM, v4hn <me@v4hn.de> wrote:

On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 07:55:11AM -0700, Jonathan Jones wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 7:36 AM, v4hn <me@v4hn.de> wrote:
>
> > On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 07:39:14AM -0500, Ian Johnson wrote:
> > > ko dunda pa plise mi is "make it true that there exists exactly one apple
> > > that you give to me."
> >
> > > If you have an apple in mind and say that, then you're not conveying
> > > that you have one in mind at all.
> >
> > Completely understood and absolutely right.
> >
> > However, as far as I can see {ko dunda pa plise mi} does not explicitly
> > say whether or not you have a specific apple in mind.
> > It's just, that I didn't specify it, if I have one in mind.
> > In my opinion it's still a valid counterquestion to ask "Which one?" here,
> > don't you think so?
> >
> > Also, if you answer with {pa plise} again, it might be a bit stupid, but
> > still
> > it's a reasonable answer to say "I got that part, but which one do you
> > want?"
> > in my opinion.
> >
> > The question is, whether there is a way to _spell out_ that you _don't_
> > have one in mind instead of omitting further information and waiting
> > for the listener to recognize the conversational implicature.
> >
> > No such way, which does not explicitly state {ko cuxna} or {mi na pensi lo
> > selsteci},
> > was mentioned up to now _as far as I understood everything_
> > and even the {ko dunda da poi plise ku'o mi} seems to rest on a very strong
> > conversational implicature instead of explicitly stating that you don't
> > care/know which one you'll get.
> >
> > That is because it doesn't seem to be a problem to me to add
> >
> > {ko dunda da poi plise ku'o mi .ije mi djica lonu do dunda lo zunle traji
> > mi}.
> >
> > However, it is weird to say something like "Give me any apple. I want the
> > leftmost one."
> > or "Gib mir irgendeinen Apfel. Ich will den ganz Linken." (in my mother
> > tongue).
> >
> >
> > Any opinions?
> >
> >
> > v4hn
> >
>
> I do't don't why you's want to explicitly state non-specificity. Why is
> extremely over the top vague not good enough for you?

Because, as I said earlier, the mechanism that makes you understand the "over the
top vague" _expression_ is a conversational implicature and it's a rather harsh field
of study to extract these from a sentence. Also they can always be cancelled afterwards
as I've tried to demonstrate, and you therefore don't really /commit/ yourself to
them.

> In any case, the best I can up with is the lujvo {nalterte'i}.

Don't you mean {nalselte'i}?

I suppose you could do that instead, yes. I meant {nalterte'i}, however, as that refers to a set within which no member has anything special about it.

This would look as follows then?

{ko dunda lo plise poi nalselte'i ku'o mi} or {ko dunda lo nalselte'i plise mi}

I didn't really make up my mind about these up to now...

v4hn