, but things are not nearly as muddled as
some people persist in claiming. that being said, a number of examples
would be helpful to make the points already established clear and
forceful to all.
On Monday, January 28, 2013 7:24:39 PM UTC+4, clifford wrote:
Yes,
let's do get this away from Aesop (does anyone remember what the
connection was?) and stick to meddlesome quantifiers and operators.
To
start. 1) "any" is fairly peculiar to English (and related languages)
but it seems that all its logical roles are related to scope issues,
whether the scope at variance with the quantifier's, conditional or
imperative or intensional. Lojban doesn't do the scopes other than the
propositional ones well
(hardly at all), so we are left to context or jury-rigging: how do we
indicate that the "an apple" is best scoped as within, rather than
outside the command (and the underlying intensional bit about
what would happen were I to get an apple or were my request to be acted
upon positively)? Tossing {tu'a}s around, while justifiable, seems
inelegant at best.
2.
Yes, {le} makes purely denotative terms (God, how that phrase brings
back seminars and symposia of old). It is pragmatically urged that the
predicate involved be somehow connected to the object in the view of the
other participants than the speaker but that is not strictly required.
a le phrase points to a particular definite (or is it specific?) thing
(in the xorlo sense) and just that, so that thing must be in UD, but is
otherwise not restricted.
3.
As I have said, the main feature of {lo} is salience. A lo phrase
refers to the things with the indicated property that currently are of
interest -- including bringing them to our attention as one possible
way. What things is quite open to contextual determination: {lo broda}
may, depending on context, refer to the physical mass of all brodas, or
the class of them or some subclass or or broda alone or various chunks
of one or several brodas taken separately or en masse. There are
various auxiliary devices (not all well-developed) for disambiguating if
context doesn't work.
4
Neither {le} nor {lo} correlate in any regular way to English "the" or
"a", though, because of salience, repeated {lo broda} comes to
be "the" regularly.
5. But {lo} is always bad for "any" because salience -- or any specifying factor -- is just what "any" does not have.
My suggestion is that we create a list of many many examples and each lojbanist is given opportunity to translate them.
Otherwise
this problem will never be solved. Probably people here don't
understand what all those terms like "specific" or "salience" or other
terms. vau zo'onai
Yes, seriously i dont remember when i
started that thread on "any". Long ago. No solution that has been
approved by at least 90% of lojbanists.
The same questions and answers arise again and again.
We need a huge list of
examples.
mu'o
On Monday, January 28, 2013 5:53:47 PM UTC+4, tsani wrote:
FWIW,
I recall the CLL mentioning that using lo and le in a manner analogous
to "a" and "the", for back-referencing, is bad. I'm just not sure how
many of you will agree with the CLL. (Also, I can't be bothered to look
it up.)
{lo} *can* refer to things in context, and have definite
referents. It's the *generic* article in the sense that we *don't know*
if it's being definite or indefinite. The definite-indefinite
distinction seems to slowly be dying in IRC Lojban, which is -- I'd
wager -- where the majority of "spoken" Lojban happens. If there is such
a thing as conversational Lojban, it's on IRC.
As for the "any"
discussion, I'm slowly beginning to see the merits of sisku2 as a
property. If we use a simple article plus a selbri, we invoke {zo'e} and
somewhere, there are definite referents that appear. {.i mi sisku lo
plise} has the awful problem of having semi-definite referents
(quantifierless {lo} doesn't actually need to for strange xorlo
reasons). However, assuming xorlo strangeness doesn't happen, the formal
definition says we can plug in {zo'e noi ke'a plise} (the formal
definition should change, IMVHO, to reflect the fact that {lo} can be
quite bullshit-y.) -> {.i mi sisku zo'e noi ke'a plise}. Here's the
proof that actual referents appear. {zo'e} has referents. Now, if any
apple will do, there *shouldn't* be referents. Now, maybe it's possible
to hack our way around this with {da}-magics, but it seems like invoking
the property that is being searched for is a more succinct solution, as
-- and here's the important
part -- *any* object satisfying that predicate will work.
I haven't really analysed this to a greater degree
that might suggest that using properties can most of the time / always
work. I think however that exploring this possibility is worthwhile,
unless we all get our facts straight about xorlo. (As it is, everyone
has their own interpretation. Please don't say otherwise. In fact, I
used to think I knew what I was talking about when I said "xorlo", but I
realise that I don't. I used to think I agreed with certain people
about xorlo, but I realise that I don't.)
.i mi'e la tsani mu'o
P.S.
if this is going to degenerate into a full-blown discussion about
articles and scopes and everything awful in the world, shouldn't we make
a new topic?
Yes, let's close the topic and continue where we left last time.
Other similar topics:
Quantifier exactness
https://groups. google.com/forum/#!topic/ lojban/cJHKEf8kE3Q