Re: [lojban] Individuals and xorlo

Sorry for intruding. I need to explain this in simple words for a future lojban tutorial.

{zo'e} denotes an individual/individuals.

{lo najgenja} = carrot/carrots

{ci lo najgenja cu grake li 60} = {ci zo'e noi najgenja cu grake li 60} - describes carrots. Three of carrots are 60 grams each.

Now I postulate an axiom that {[su'o] lo pa najgenja} describes one carrot (I'll avoid formulae here since i need it for a tutorial, not for a reference grammar).

{ro lo ci najgenja} describes each of the three carrots.

Two important conclusions:

1. {ro lo ci najgenja cu grake li 60} - one carrot is always 60 grams in weight.

2. {ro loi ci najgenja cu grake li 60} = {ro zo'e noi gunma lo ci najgenja cu grake li 60} - describes masses (again of carrots but carrots here are of less importance since carrots are hidden inside gunma2). Each mass of carrots (with three carrots in each mass) is 60 grams so each carrots weighs 20 grams on average.

Is my reasoning correct?

I remember someone saying that {lo} is more vague and might include masses as well but here {loi} and it's underlying {gunma} move carrots higher. Can we accept raising here? If yes then all this reasoning immediately breaks.

On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 3:36 AM, Dan Rosén <lurifax@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear selmriste,

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.

Using zo'e directly is obviously fruitless since xorlo seems to influence how
both zo'e, and how noi work: together they remove our abilities to explicitly
talk about individuals. This make me assume that it also affects the
da-family, so {pa xanto} is also out of the question.

Finally, any brivla will not help us here as the dreaded lo-zo'e-noi-trinity
will always be able to sneak in a group where we want an individual. For
instance in {lo pa kantu be lo pa xanto}, or {lo xantyka'u}, we still might end
up with a onesome of elephants.

Why was it decided to make it like this? It seems that a monolingual jbopre
would not /really/ be able to differentiate an elephant from its flock.
(But perhaps not if we were talking about sheep, but I digress)

Hopefully I have misunderstood everything. If this is so, please enlighten me.

ki'e mi'e la danr

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