Subject: Re: [lojban] pro-sumti question

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 05 Jul 2002 12:30:39 +0000

la greg cusku di'e

>I can't now work out what {le remei} actually means. How would it differ
>from {lei remei}?

le remei = each of the pairs
lei remei = all the pairs together

>It is, however likely that {lu'o le gerku .e le mlatu cu tatpi} doesn't 
>mean
>that all of them are tired. Otherwise an officer telling his superior "lei
>nanmu cu tatpi" would not be telling the truth.

For {lei nanmu cu tatpi} to be true, it is not necessary that
{ro le nanmu cu tatpi} be true. However, {pa le nanmu cu tatpi}
does not entail {lei nanmu cu tatpi}. If the officer tells
his superior {lei nanmu cu tatpi} just because one of them
is, he would not be telling the truth. The group as a whole
should be tired.

>I think this is one place where the book is right in the wrong way. The
>implicit quantifiers on lei don't work as they should. A mass, considered 
>as
>a mass, is either tired or isn't (otherwise masses are as useful as sets).
>We can't have a situation where {lei nanmu cu tatpi .ije naku lei nanmu cu
>tatpi} is true.

Right. At least not any more than {mi ge tatpi ginai tatpi}.

>I'm going around in circles saying nothing here, so here are the main
>points, which should go of into three seperate threads:
>
>- How do we refer to the referents of the sumtis of the last sentence? (I
>think some sort of prosumti should be experimented with)

The problem is that we don't want such precision. For example,
we may have something like "X said such and such. Y said such
and such. Then _they_ went away."

In your scheme, you would get a prosumti for "Y and what Y said",
not one for "X and Y". The prosumti we want here is necessarily
vague, and {le remei} (or {le romoi}, or whatever number works best
in context) I think is the best we have. I used this method a few
times in the Alice translation.

>- What do we do about these stupid-mass-things (pe'i la djan cowan po'o 
>ka'e
>ciksi). It makes no sense to be able to say {loi cmacu cu crinu} because I
>decided that dying my own hair green wasn't enough.

But notice that {pisu'o} is the right quantifier for {loi},
just like {su'o} is for {lo}. {loi smacu cu crino}
says that some mice are green, about the same as {lo smacu cu crino},
since there is not much difference here in being green together
or individually.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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