Subject: Re: [lojban] pro-sumti question

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 2002 12:20:24 EDT

In a message dated 7/4/2002 9:19:21 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> The '98 cmavo list calls it a set also. Don't see how it matters
> anyway though. What cmavo liste are you looking at?

My list is from Sept '94, right after the Logfest at which the issue was 
settled. I am sorry to here that '98 still has the older form.

<Ahh it sounded like you meant "le remei" as a set/mass (which it isn't).>

I did mean that {le remei} refers to a mass ("le remei" is a Lojban 
expression). You said that something beginning with {le} could not refer to 
a mass or a set and I pointed to a case -- other than {le remei} of an 
ex[ression that has to refer to a set to make sense. I would argue that {le 
se remei} is another such case, but that is begging the question in this 
discussion.

<> > I was talking about the sumti themselves -- that's the only way this 
works.
> > See below:
> 
> As xorxes pointed out, {sumti} is used ambiguously in English: for both the 

> linguistic expression and its referent. It is not ambiguous in Lojban (it 
is 
> the expression) and I try to use it that way in English -- and take others 
as 
> doing so as well, if possible. What DO you mean by "the sumti themselves"? 

> Your text reads like something that fluctuates over the two English 
meanings 
> and, when read conistently in one reading or the other, is clearly false 
> (use-mention ambiguity in a peculiarly Lojbanic form).

I mean the sumti as opposed to the "sumti referents", which is the term i've
been using to refer to la'e of a sumti.>

I take this to mean that you are talking about the expressions used, not the 
things mentioned by suing tose expressions. But then your claim -- that the 
referent of {le remei} is the two sumti is just false (in the present 
context), for the *expressions* are not referred to at all.

<> > I was going on bad definition remei. the point was the "sumti smuni" 
part.
> > I'm talking about a pair of things refered to by sumti. The two sumti
> > referents mentioned were:
> > all of somenumber of dogs
> > all of somenumber of cats
> 
> Well, unless the number is 1 in each case, this will not be a pair. "All" 
is 
> a lousy reading in English (and a bad translation from Latin and Greek), 
> "every" is better: the reference is each taken separately, not to any 
lumping 
> (mass or set) of them -- {le} always comes down to a conjunction. There is 

> no separate level of the sort you mention between the individual dogs and 
> cats and their mass.

You seem to be missing the fundamental point. The are only *two*
sumti. No matter how many animals are refered to. "le remei" being
"the pair" being the speaker's description (ala "le") of "the
referents of a pair of previous sumti". I don't know how much
clearer it can get than that, so i'm out of this thread unless ya
address that instead of addressing one-of-the-many-other-things-which-
the-speaker-could-describe-as-a-pair.>

Yes, there are only two sumt -- expressions, {le gerku} and {le mlatu}. And 
the number of things they each refer to is irrelevant to that fact. But {le 
remei} does not refer to that pair, since neither aexpression nor a team of 
expressions can be tired. Only living creatures (and probably only those of 
a certain degree of complexity) can be tired, and expressions aren't living 
creatures (Borges notwithstanding). 

You want {le remei} to refer to a mass (or whatever) composed of the 
referents of these two expressions. But the size of that mass will vary 
depending on the number of referents there are -- not on the number of 
expressions used to refer to them. The size of the referent of {lu'o le 
gerku} varies on the number things referred to by {le gerku} and does not 
depend at all upon the fact that those things are all referred to by a single 
expression. To be sure, I suppose that {lu'o le gerku} refers to only one 
mass (though I am not sure about that), but, so does {lu'o le gerku e le 
mlatu}. It is the number of referents, not the number of referring 
expressions, that decides the size of (the set underlying) a mass. 

You could get what you want, maybe, in some other way, though, since it is 
not something I have ever thought to say, I am not sure how.