Subject: partial recantation in favour of solomonics

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 Nov 2002 19:36:08 -0000

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.