Subject: Re: [lojban] go'i: repeated referents or just sumti?

From: EWC <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 15:14:49 -0700

On Tue, 26 Feb 2002 19:18:32, "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
wrote:

>(Strictly speaking, the sumti are the referents, but you
>follow the usual tradition we have here of misusing 'sumti'
>to refer to the words rather than to the arguments themselves.)

The gimste definiton of {sumti} says that lo sumti is text, so if you're
speaking in Lojban about sumti you have to quote words. Similarly, lo
bridi are also text. That makes {sumti} a grammatical category like
"noun". I'm not a noun, but "I" is. 

.i mi na sumti .ijeku'i zo mi go'i

>The same cats. Use {go'ira'o} to update referents.

Okay. The section in the Book on ra'o and the ma'oste only mention
updating pro-sumti/pro-bridi cmavo, not all sumti.

>It would be
>very bad manners to use a bare {le mlatu} again for a different
>group of cats.

With the implicit inner quantifiers made explicit it doesn't seem so
bad, though.

.i le su'o mlatu cu catlu mi 
.i le su'o mlatu cu catlu le gerku

As logical statements there's no requirment that the group of cats
remains the same between statements. There are just two groups each
consisting of at least one thing described as a cat. If you were a
computer interpreting those statements you couldn't assume the "all of
at least one described as cat"s were the same.

I'll still happily accept that it's convention that the speaker
shouldn't change mental "described-as" groups, changing {le mlatu} to
meaning "all of all the things I'm described as cats in this
discussion", but the underlying logic doesn't require it. Pro-sumti are
there to force repetition of referents if needed, after all.

-- 
EWC