On 6 January 2013 15:59, Ian Johnson <
blindbravado@gmail.com> wrote:
> The issue of quantifier exactness has come up a few times already. The most
> recent example was "context and precision" which was forked by aionys from
> another thread. You can look at that thread On IRC today, playing around
> with functions we stumbled upon a combination of a sentence and situation
> such that one stance on quantifier exactness makes the sentence false while
> the other makes it true. Here's the setup:
>
> There are 4 people, mi, do, la alis, la bab; the latter two are grouped
> under {lo re prenu}.
> I like la alis a little bit, but hate la bab.
> You like la alis and la bab a lot.
> Now consider
> {mi zmadu do lo ni ce'u nelci pa lo re prenu}
> (If the ni confuses you, pretend it's ka, as that part's not important here.
> We can talk about ka-ni elsewhere.)
>
> If quantifiers are exact, this is true. {do nelci pa lo re prenu} is
> completely false (you like two of them, not one), while {mi nelci pa lo re
> prenu} is true, if only a little bit, so I do exceed you in that aspect.
> Note that the CLL says this is how the language works, but if you look at
> the previous discussions you'll find that this is clumsy fairly frequently.
> If quantifiers are not exact, this is false or at least false-ish, since {ro
> da poi me lo re prenu zo'u do zmadu mi lo ni ce'u nelci da}.
>
> I thought this example warranted discussion primarily because it does not
> arise because of annoying, semi-ontological issues related to the universe
> of discourse. Instead there's only two people being quantified over, but the
> two interpretations still differ with respect to this (relatively simple)
> sentence.
>
> .i do ma jinvi
>
> .i mi'e la latro'a mu'o
>