Re: [lojban] Individuals and xorlo

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 8:36 PM, Dan Rosén <lurifax@gmail.com> wrote:

It seems that using xorlo prevents explicitly talking about indivduals, such as
/one elephant/, a seemingly simple concept. Let's start with an inner quantifier:

    lo pa xanto = zo'e noi ke'a xanto gi'e zilkancu li pa lo xanto,

However, the latter {lo xanto} in zilkancu3 can denote about a group of
elephants, so {lo pa xanto} can indeed be many elephants.  Outer quantifiers
will not help, as they will only range over the inner object.

"lo pa xanto" can only be a single elephant: the elephant in front of you, the African elephant, the elephant being digested by a boa constrictor in Saint-Exupery's drawing, etc. but it always has to be one. It cannot be a group of elephants in front of you, all African elephants, the millions of elephants being digested by boa constrictors in the millions of reproductions of that picture, etc.

Sometimes you can make the same claims about the African elephant that you can make about all African elephants, or about the elephant inside the boa and about all the elephants inside all those boas, or even perhaps about the elephant in front of you and a group of elephants in front of you, but that doesn't mean that linguistically they are the same object.

mu'o mi'e xorxes 

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