From a.rosta@lycos.co.uk Fri Nov 08 11:34:19 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: a.rosta@lycos.co.uk X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_2_3_0); 8 Nov 2002 19:34:19 -0000 Received: (qmail 26974 invoked from network); 8 Nov 2002 19:34:19 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.216) by m10.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 8 Nov 2002 19:34:19 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mrin02.st1.spray.net) (212.78.193.8) by mta1.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 8 Nov 2002 19:34:18 -0000 Received: from lmin05.st1.spray.net (lmin05.st1.spray.net [212.78.202.105]) by mrin02.st1.spray.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2F88E24EBF6 for ; Fri, 8 Nov 2002 20:34:17 +0100 (CET) Received: from oemcomputer (host213-121-69-58.surfport24.v21.co.uk [213.121.69.58]) by lmin05.st1.spray.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0A44714B92 for ; Fri, 8 Nov 2002 20:34:16 +0100 (MET) To: "Lojban@Yahoogroups. Com" Subject: partial recantation in favour of solomonics Date: Fri, 8 Nov 2002 19:36:08 -0000 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0) Importance: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 From: "And Rosta" X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=122260811 X-Yahoo-Profile: andjamin First of all, please forgive this partial recantation. I was overenthusiastically trying to bring us to agreement/decision. But the interventions by John and Jordan have given me pause, and I now realize I should have heeded my own dictum that Xorxes is Usually Right. Here's my line of thinking: How do we say "99% of Lojbanists are male"? I don't know, but it ought to be doable along the same lines of so'e, "most", which also expresses a fraction of a total extension. {so'e} makes sense only with {so'e broda} and {so'e da poi broda} -- these can't be paraphrased with unrestricted da. What are the truth conditions of "99% of Lojbanists are male"? At the least they seem to require that there are at least 100 Lojbanists (or at least 2 Lojbanists, if the claim was that 50% of Lojbanists were male). So n% would seem to be importing. But I think we also would like to be able to say truthfully that "50% of unicorns are male". So it seems desirable that we should be able to mark n% quantifiers as either importing or nonimporting. Jorge already suggested a way to do that: by adding ma'u/ni'u with no default when it is omitted, and letting it be glorked from context when not used. This would naturally extend to "100% of", which is equivalent to {ro}. I therefore conclude that for all fractional quantifiers, including {ro} and {so'e}, we want both importing and nonimporting versions, and xorxes's suggestion is the best way to effect it. Is this something everyone could live with? --And.