Subject: Re: [lojban] pro-sumti question In-Reply-To F2597BBJXLGV0KTqQk900006d70@hotmail

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 06 Jul 2002 22:58:17 +0000

la pycyn cusku di'e

>What an odd thing to say -- the fact that we have a lot of rules means 
>there
>are NO rules? There may not be any of great generality, but there is a 
>rule
>that covers each case.

Ok, I don't think we're disagreeing about much here.

>And of course, the case about weights -- if there are
>other cases like it, ice-cream-eating, say -- can be covered by a general
>rule ("add numerical quantities") and a rather trivial guide to tell in 
>what
>place (very remote in the ice cream case) that quantity is located 
>(something
>for machines, not humans, obviously).

As long as people don't take those rules too literally,
that's ok. But Lojbanists tend to soon forget the spirit
of the rule and run with the letter, with disastrous results.
(We tend to read the rule written for humans as if it had
been written for machines.)

Take the eating case. The rule here should give something
like this:

ko'a citka ko'e
fo'a citka fo'e
ko'a joi fo'a citka ko'e joi fo'e

But this one will also probably be true:

ko'a joi fo'a citka ko'e e fo'e

This one, however, should be false:

ko'a e fo'a citka ko'e joi fo'e

All of that follows from the semantics of {citka}, whatever
the sum rules may say.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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