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Re: [lojban] [oz] {lo prenu cu cmamau lo makcu}


On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 1:29 PM, Felipe Gonçalves Assis <felipeg.assis@gmail.com> wrote:
The full sentence is
  {lo prenu cu cmamau lo makcu poi dy ke'a se slabu}.
{lo prenu} refers to what turns out to be three Munchkins and the Witch of the North, and dy is Dorothy.

The plausible interpretation is of course distributive,
  {ro lo prenu cu cmamau ro lo makcu}.

I wouldn't interpret it that way. My interpretation is that for the purposes of this comparison all the referents of "lo prenu" are essentially the same size and count as one thing, all the referents of "lo makcu poi ..." are essentially the same size and count as one, and the former is smaller than the latter. (This could be called a generic reading, or "myopic singularization".) I very much doubt that the intention of such a sentence is to make a cross product comparison of ro vs ro.
  
But, if predicates are to be defined on plural variables, shouldn't the original sentence mean that the bunch of prenu is, collectively, smaller than the bunch of makcu?

That's an unlikely reading just because comparing people's sizes is more common than comparing groups of people's sizes. If instead of "cmamau" the predicate used was "fewer" ("klanyme'a"?) then the group reading would be the one that makes more sense, since a single person doesn't have any such obvious quantity to compare as the cardinality of a group.

Is the translation wrong? Or is the sentence ambiguous? If so, how to unambiguously convey the collective interpretation?

To convey a comparison of the groups physical sizes I would say "lo prenu gunma cu cmamau lo gunma be lo makcu poi ..." 

mu'o mi'e xorxes

 

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