Subject: Re: [lojban] More about quantifiers

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 22:59:54

la pycyn cusku di'e

>I suspect that there is no simple word for it because it is so rarely 
>useful
>as opposed to {su'o...naku...} and, when it is, "not every" works fine.

"Not some" should work just as well for "no", and yet it gets
its own word in English (as well as in Lojban, coincidentally).

...
>This shows that either system is going to have to spend some
>time on multiple quantifier cases, since this kind of recalculation just
>won't work in real time.

It works in English, at least to some extent. It's not so
hard to see that "someone loves someone" means the same as
"not everyone loves no one", or that "everyone loves everyone"
means the same as "no one loves less than everyone". The problem
here is that English doesn't like "not everyone" in object
position, but fluent Lojban speakers in theory should not
have a problem with {me'iro da} there.

>There seems to be problems all over the place with
>second -- and probably later -- quantifiers.

Not with the quantifiers, only with their import, which
is most often irrelevant anyway.

>As patterns emerge, it should
>no doubt be possible to get some pretty tight rules on this.

Here's the rule: if there's an odd number of negatives in front
(that's explicit naku's plus the implicit ones inside of {no}
and {me'iro}) then the import is reversed.

>Why does Aristotle's system not have {no broda naku} = {ro broda}?

Don't ask me! He has {ro broda} with import and {no broda} with
no import, according to what you reported. Wasn't his system
(A+,E-,I+,O-)?

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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