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Re: [lojban] Re: tersmu 0.2


On Fri, Oct 10, 2014 at 9:40 AM, 'John E Clifford' via lojban <lojban@googlegroups.com> wrote:
So, assuming that we have a new {zo'e} (here "xxx"), we could equate {lo broda cu brode} with {brode xxx poi broda}, where the {poi} makes puts the {xxx} in the right slot ({broda}, not {brode} -- or, at least, before {brode}).  

So xxx would refer to everything in the universe of discourse, and "poi broda" is a restriction to just those things that satisfy "broda". Yes, that would work too. At the cost of introducing a new KOhA that refers to everything in the universe of discourse, of course. 
 
This also has the advantage of getting away from making descriptions assertive, as {noi} seems to do.  Of course, it leaves the question of why this equation is of interest.  

The original reason for coming up with a paraphrase was probably something like this: "lo" logically needs as an argument a proposition with (at least one) free variable, which is bound by "lo". But syntactically "lo" only has a sumti-tail as its dependent. and a sumti-tail is not flexible enough for many purposes. For example, to show the underlying logical structure of "lo mamta be re da" it is useful to be able to export the quantifier to a prenex, which a sumti-tail does not provide. There are different workarounds to this limitation. One is to introduce the new cmavo "poi'i", which converts a bridi, with a marked free variable, into a selbri which is just what we need for a sumti-tail, now we can rewrite "lo mamta be re da" as "lo poi'i re da zo'u ke'a mamta da". "xxx poi" would also serve: "xxx poi re da zo'u ke'a mamta da", and "zo'e noi" also serves the same purpose. The main and probably only advantage of "zo'e noi" over the other two is that it doesn't use any unofficial cmavo.

mu'o mi'e xorxes
 

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