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

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2002 16:30:43

la tanatos cusku di'e

>Cats are never arguments, they're cats
>and whatever else they are.

Among the whatever else, they may be members of sets,
holders of properties, and yes, arguments of some
relationship or other.

>If we want to ask "what is the relation between me and you", we ask {mi
>do mo},

Or {mi do ckini ma}. There's more than one way to skin a cat.

>not {ma selbri fi zo mi ce'o zo do} unless we're actually asking
>about a piece of text in a class on Lojban grammar.

I can't be sure about what the place structure of {selbri} is.
Certainly if it's about texts, it would not be the way to talk
about relationships.

>So I think having sumti, selbri, and bridi all be text works fine for
>speaking about Lojban texts in Lojban, as it should be; it's just not
>very convenient for talking about Lojban semantics in another language.

Or about Lojban semantics in Lojban, for that matter.

> >i zo mi sumti ma?
>
>.i zo mi sumti lu mi du mi
>
> which is entirely different from saying
>
>.i mi du mi

Right. So what do you make of:

lu le zarci li'u cu sumti lu mi klama li'u le remei

False, right? And what about:

zo mi sumti lu le pendo be mi cu klama li'u

Also false?

>If it were {su'o le mlatu} you wouldn't expect the same at least one cat
>each time though, right?

Right.

>You're happy to reapply {su'o} as an outer
>quantifier but not as an inner?

Right, because so called "inner quantifiers" are not quantifiers.
They merely indicate the cardinality of the set in question, they
don't bind anything. The "inner quantifier" {ro} is an empty
indicator, because every set has ro members (including the
empty set, the way I understand {ro}).

>That brings up a question I don't remember being addressed. Does
>pro-sumti assignment happen before or after the outer quantification?
>I'd guess that ko'a in {re le mlatu goi ko'a} would refer to all the
>cats in mind, while in {re le mlatu ku goi ko'a} ko'a would refer to the
>two cats out of all in mind, the relative clause being either inside or
>outside the description and therefore either before or after the outer
>quantification.

The problem is that {ko'a} can only refer to one thing (if many
things then as a mass), otherwise things get very messy. It is
not clear how {ko'a} can refer to "the two cats out of all in mind"
or even to "all the cats in mind". Does it incorporate the
quantifier? Everything breaks down if it does.

The way I would want to interpret it, is that
{re le mlatu goi ko'a ... ko'a} is equivalent to
{re da voi mlatu ... da}. And the same for {re le mlatu ku goi ko'a}.
A second quantification would be restricted to the same set as the
first, so {ci ko'a} will quantify from the same set of in mind cats.

>Hmm, but then what about BY pro-sumti used without assignment? {re le
>mlatu cu blabi. i pa my. sipna}. Is that one of the two white cats or
>one of all the cats in mind in the first statement?

One of all the cats in mind. The first reference to two cats
does not define a set, unless you include the whole bridi as
the definition, but then what if the second quantification appeared
in the same bridi?

mu'o mi'e xorxes

_________________________________________________________________
Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com