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Re: [lojban] Individuals and xorlo


On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 4:40 AM, guskant <gusni.kantu@gmail.com> wrote:


I meant I was deceived by the description on the gadri page that {lo broda} "refers generically to any or some individual or individuals". Because I knew what is among and what is individual, I believed that "individual" on the page is something different from what is defined in the theory of among. Actually, the word "individual" is not necessary for definition of {lo}. If {lo} were first defined, and after that "individual" were defined, then I would not have been deceived.

I agree that the definition is not ideal. It's just the least bad we could come up with at the time. I prefer the one in Lojban.  

Whether {ro'oi da su'oi de ro'oi di poi ke'a me de zo'u de me di ije de me da} is applied or not to a universe of discourse is not always important in usual conversation. We can talk with each other without mentioning individuals:

- xu do djica tu'a lo ckafi 
 - go'i iji'a tu'a lo sakta

It is not necessary to mention that {lo ckafi} and {lo sakta} are individuals. They can exist as non-individual, as long as we don't apply an outer quantifier to them.

I agree, but it doesn't seem harmful to take them as individuals either. If it's followed by "mi ba zi dunda lo re da do", atomicity has been invoked and now they are individuals (each of them one). 

The thing is that the language has from its design a strong bias towards atomicity. Numbers don't make much sense without any atoms to count, and numbers are a very basic feature, not just of Lojban but of most natlangs (maybe all of them except allegedly Piraha). So even if we don't take atomicity as a common ground axiom, in practice it seems that it can always be invoked without any special effort. 

In any case, if you are still thinking of putting in writing a detailed alternative presentation of "lo" I will be interested to read it.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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