Subject: Re: [lojban Re: mei (was Pro-Sumti) In-Reply-To F82t69A9gy3Xiz93Fd100006cb6@hot

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 2002 14:22:44 EDT

In a message dated 7/6/2002 5:35:39 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> <<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"?>>
> 

I thought it odd (as I do with any other definition as well) to consider a 
dozen eggs as a mass. {pare sovda} works much better -- or {gai sovda} to 
preserve the quaintness.

<<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.>>

Agreed from top almost to bottom.
{piro} is no more transparent to negation boundaries or quantifier order than 
{pisu'o} is -- {piro loi broda na brode} = {pisu'o loi broda cu naku brode} 
(I know that you probably allow {piro} on empty masses, but skipping that 
oddity for now -- it just means we have to use the marked forms here).
And the choice of the default quantifier, it it has any reason other than 
"something has to be default" is likely tied up with the nature of masses 
and thus affects every word that deals with masses. On that ground, I think 
that selected masses are different from universal ones -- but Lojban says 
they are not, so all get the same treatment.

<<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.>>

Well, I agree that there is little in history to support this claim -- other 
than the default {pisu'o}, of course. But that is a pretty big chunk of 
lore. The basic way to talk about a mass is to talk about some uspecified 
subpart (what I take your first sentence to mean -- masses don't generally 
stand for anything). {ko'a joi ko'e joi ko'i} stands for some mass {lei ... 
[whatever predicate fits exactly these three things]} in a fundamental way 
and thus -- by the admitted rule about implict quantification -- stands for 
some unspecified submass from that set of things (my preferred reading of 
{mei} in any case) . To say it is the whole mass is either to say that the 
default quantifer on {loi} is {piro}, which you don't want, or to say that 
{ko'a joi ko'e joi ko'i} is not equivalent to {loi du be ko'a be'o ja du be 
ko'e be'o ja du be ko'i} (to pick the most boring -- and safest -- unique 
property of this cluster). I admit that {le cimei} may be different because I 
can't see any disaster happening if it is -- yet. I thow it in to be safe -- 
and consistent when talking about masses.

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

It doesn't yet for me -- I'm doing this to avoid intensionality, remember. 
But if the two masses mention above -- named by {joi}s between its member 
names and the other named as the mass of those which have the property 
uniigue to the things named are different, then the difference between them 
is intensional -- since the set underlying them are identical (or "they have 
exactly the same members").