Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: mei (was Pro-Sumti)

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 06 Jul 2002 22:34:36 +0000

la pycyn cusku di'e

> > **nmei: x1 is a mass of n elements taken from set x2>>
>
>And I like (as I read xorxes) x1 is a mass taken from the n elements of set
>x2.

With that interpretation, I don't know what you made of the example
I gave with the definition, {lo paremei be loi sovda} for "a dozen
eggs". Did you take that to mean "up to a dozen eggs"?

>There are (for me, in my
>present mood) no problems with getting consistency by extending the
>peculiarities of {lei} or {loi} to {mei}. It is what I am more or less
>setting forth as what the Book amounts to saying.

I think there are two issues here that perhaps we are conflating.

One issue is what should the implicit quantifiers on {lei} and
{loi} be. That's a purely conventional decision and should not
have any effect on anything else. Both {piro lei broda} and
{pisu'o lei broda} will be possible in any case, and which
one of them {lei broda} stands for is just a matter of efficiency.
I happen to think that {piro lei broda} is the meaning most
frequently required, as well as being the easiest term to
handle, because it is transparent to negation boundaries and
other quantifiers, it can be moved through them with no change
of meaning. But whichever quantifier is chosen as implicit, the
other one is still available. The choice of which one gets the
shortcut cannot affect the semantics of anything else. At least
it is not at all clear why it should.

The second issue is what you seem to be advocating: that a mass
can stand for any of its submasses. You seem to be saying that
{ko'a joi ko'e joi ko'i} can refer to a mass of only two members,
ko'a and ko'e, that {le mumei} can refer to a mass of three members.
Somehow you derive this from {pisu'o} being the implicit quantifier
of {lei}, but I don't see how that follows. {ko'a joi ko'e joi ko'i}
is a mass with three members ko'a, ko'e and ko'i, no more nor less.
It is the whole mass. There are ways to refer to part of that mass,
but naturally they have to be more complex than the way to simply
refer to it as a whole. Similarly {le mumei} refers to a mass of
five members. Not to a part of that mass. And in this issue I don't
think there has been historically anything taught to the contrary.

(I have to admit I still don't get how the problem of
intensionality appears here.)

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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