Re: [lojban] "we" and masses. A bug in the CLL?

After slogging through this long and repetitive thread, I find I have lost what the point was. To help guiding my understanding, I summarize the present situation as I understand it.
In a given speech situation there is are a bunch (maybe only one) of people speaking or being represented by the speaker ({mi}), another bunch (not necessarily separate) who directly or vicariously hear the speech ({do}), and a third group not directly involved in the speech act ({ko'a} and just about everything else).
In the event being spoken about any or all of these groups (or parts of them) may be involved and they may be referred to by the designations derived from their speech-act roles: {mi + do}, {mi + ko'a}, {do + ko'a} and {mi + do + ko'a}, in various abbreviated forms.
On a standard Lojban assumption (at least since xorlo achieved its final form), the simplest such forms refer to the united bunches. The question of how those bunches satisfy the predicates involved is left to context or a demand for clarification.
Toward clarification, then, we have a different forms for when the bunch satisfies the predicate distributively (individually, more or less) and when it satisfies it collectively (as a mass, ditto).
As a side note, the English (and perhaps many other languages') "we", does not correspond directly to any of these things, since it is distinctly plural (unlike {mi}) and may include or exclude any number of others.
So, aside from the general point that the issue of how a bunch of things satisfies a predicate ought to be a question about how to ark a predicate rather than how to mark an argument, what is the issue here? Apparently, it is that the system is defective in not covering all the possibilities of representing these combinations of bunches as individuals and masses. But why do we care about that? We do have ways of doing that for descriptions, but rarely use them (and often with proper trepidation, since often wrongly). Why worry about a similar shortage in pronouns (why not rather worry about the maount of cmavo space burned up in these efforts)?
BTW, "ambiguity" and "vagueness" are quite different notions, and calling the one a form of the other just muddies already rather murk waters.

From: Felipe Gonçalves Assis <felipeg.assis@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sunday, June 16, 2013 11:52 AM
Subject: Re: [lojban] "we" and masses. A bug in the CLL?

With respect to the ambiguous "we":
The Tupi language, spoken by Brazilian Indians, is an example of a
language that has three distinct "we"s:
* "îandé", corresponding to {mi'o}
* "ore", corresponding to {mi'a} or plural {mi}, and
* "asé", corresponding to {ma'a}.

You will have trouble arguing that the mandatory disambiguation is a
heavy burden on the speaker. The concept of {do} is very clear on
one's mind, and so, the distinction of {mi'o} vs. {mi'a} vs. {ma'a},
regardless of his mother tongue.

And what about "you", which is ambiguous between {do} and {do'a} (even
when plural)?

With respect to {joi} vs. {jo'u}:
I guess this is part of the post-xorlo phenomenon of avoiding masses
where unnecessary. I am particularly pro {jo'u}, which is simple and
general. Anyway, such a change would be for CLL 2.0...

mu'o
mi'e .asiz.

On 16 June 2013 02:11, la arxokuna <gleki.is.my.name@gmail.com> wrote:
> First let me show an extract from the loglan dictionary.
>
> mio (p) we/us/ourselves, in the "I/me and others independently" sense, the
> 1st 3rd person multiple variable. Equivalent to 'mi, e da'. Cf. mu/mo for
> the "you and I/me" sense of we/us, and muu/muo for the "you and I and
> others" sense of we/us.
> mu (p) we/us/ourselves, in the "you and I/me jointly" sense, the 1st 2nd
> person set variable. Equivalent to 'mi ze tu'. Cf. mo for the "you and I/me
> independently" sense of we/us, miu/mio for the "I and others" sense of
> we/us, and muu/muo for the "you and I and others" sense of we/us.
> miu (p) we/us/ourselves, in the "I/me and others jointly" sense, the 1st 3rd
> person set variable. Equivalent to 'mi ze da'. Cf. mu/mo for the "you and
> I/me" sense of we/us, and muu/muo for the "you and I and others" sense of
> we/us.
> mo (p) we/us/ourselves, in the "you and I/me independently" sense, the 1st
> 2nd person multiple variable. Equivalent to 'mi, e tu'. Cf. mu for the "you
> and I/me jointly" sense of we/us, miu/mio for the "I and others" sense of
> we/us, and muu/muo for the "you and I and others" sense of we/us.
>
> What one might notice first is that there is no equivalent to "mio/miu"
> which corresponds to English "we".
>
> "we" is defined in Wiktionary as "The speakers/writers, or the
> speaker/writer and at least one other person." so the meaning is pretty
> clear.
> However, the CLL says "English-speakers often suffer because they cannot
> easily distinguish “mi'o” from “mi'a”" which is indeed true. I don't
> understand why Lojban doesn't have "we" in the sense English, Chinese,
> Russian, Arabic, Hindi and Spanish have it (although i suggested mi'ai a few
> days ago).
>
> Now to the main issue. Even if we look at the remaining "mu/mo" we'll see
> that Lojban has only one of them.
>
> The CLL says (regarding KOhA3)
>
> "All of these pro-sumti represent masses. For example, “mi'o” is the same as
> “mi joi do”, the mass of me and you considered jointly."
> This means we can't talk say "Each of us carries the piano" vs. "We as a
> mass carry the piano" as (at least what Randall Holmes says) a mass should
> not be converted into the conjunction of its component parts by any logical
> operator because strictly speaking it shouldn't come with a privileged
> partition
>
> However, jvs has two definitions, the second one (by selpahi) defining
> {mi'o} as "mi jo'u do" entered in December 2012. I don't remember any
> discussions of this issue at that time.
>
> I don't know if it should be {ro mi'o bevri} vs. {lu'o mi'o bevri} or {ro
> lu'a mi'o bevri} vs. {lu'o mi'o bevri}.
>
> So should we change the CLL to say it means {jo'u}, not {joi}?
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "lojban" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
> email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
> To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
>
>

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.