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

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2002 23:43:30

la tanatos cusku di'e

>[Re: le su'o mlatu]
>
>Well, {le su'o mlatu} is what I describe as "at least one cat".

It's "each of the at least one things I describe as cats".
{su'o} indicates a true cardinality of the in mind set.

>Of all
>the things I describe as "at least one cat" it's not required that they
>be identical.

Of course not, but {le su'o mlatu} refers to each one of them.
{le re mlatu} are each of two things that I describe as "cat",
it is not one or many things that I describe as "two cats".

>{ro le su'o mlatu} doesn't refer to all of the thing I
>ever describe as cats, just all of one set I'm describing as at least
>one cat.

There is no 'ever' in {le}, that's true, but other than that
it does refer to each of the things I'm describing.

>{le mlatu cu catlu le mlatu}, for example,
>is not necessarily the same as {le mlatu cu catlu vo'a}, or even {le
>mlatu cu catlu le nei}. In the first, each of one group of cats looks
>at each of another group of cats (possibly the same group). In the
>second, each of a group of cats looks at itself. In the last, each of
>one group of cats looks at each member of that same group, including
>itself.

I completely agree. But in the absence of further context, I will
tend to read {le mlatu cu catlu le mlatu} as {le mlatu cu catlu le nei}.

> >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}.
>
>Which means that the second ko'a refers necessarily to each of the
>previous two cats, or the same two cats out of those described as "at
>least one cat".

Not necessarily. {re le mlatu} by itself does not define any set
of two cats. Consider this:

re le mlatu goi ko'a na catlu ko'a
It is not the case that exactly two of the cats looks at itself.

Can you really say that ko'a is referring to two particular cats
there? It refers to all of the cats in a sense but to noone in
particular. It's a bound variable.

>And what if {re le mlatu goi ko'a ... ko'a} were instead equivalent to
>{da voi mlatu zo'u re da ... ro da}? Then the second ko'a refers to
>each of the "described as at least one cat", or the set in mind before
>we selected two for the first claim.

It would be possible to define things like that, I suppose, but
you can get that meaning anyway by saying explicitly {ro ko'a},
which re-binds the variable. If {ko'a} itself produced an
automatic rebinding, we would lose the possibility of using it
within the same original binding.

>Ah, {re le mlatu cu klama pa my}? If {my} refers to the described as
>"at least one cat", then two of the "at least one cat" goes to one of
>the "at least one cat", or {da voi mlatu zo'u re da klama pa da}.

Correct in my view. (But you will find opponents of that view,
for example The Book, which has some odd and to my mind inconsistent
treatment of requantification of the same variable.)

>If
>{my} refers to the two cats, as if it were {pa lenei}, then it would be
>{re da voi mlatu zo'u da klama pa da}, or one of the two cats is gone to
>by both cats.

No, because {re da voi mlatu} does not say how many cats you
have in mind, it is equivalent to {re le mlatu}, not {le re mlatu}.
What you want is something like {ro da poi du le re mlatu zo'u da
klama pa da}. In that case {pa da} is "one of the two cats", or
{pa le re mlatu}. Otherwise it is just {pa da voi mlatu}, but
we've never said how many so called cats there are.

>It seems more useful for {my} to refer to the described
>as "at least one cat".

I'm not sure what you mean. The "at least one" is not really
part of the description, but I'm not sure that matters.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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