Subject: Re: [lojban] (no subject)

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 21:22:23 EDT

In a message dated 5/31/2001 6:30:50 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> I'm not quite sure what my suggestions are yet, I'm just exploring
> for the moment. But it does seem useful to distinguish for example
> 

.

Well, as noted, I am not too sure about the general usefulness of any sets at 
all, but given there are some to be spoken of, we would want to be able to do 
both of these.

<>I'm
>not sure, by the way, that {lu'i ro loi broda} is well-formed:

It is grammatical. We have to decide whether we want to give it
any meaning or not.>

OK, so we can put a non-fractional quantifier in front of {loi}, with as yet 
undefined sense.

<One possibility is for {ro loi broda} to mean "each mass of broda".
Another possibility is that it is meaningless, another that it means
"the one mass of all broda", same as {piro loi broda}.>

The first sounds plausible and maybe useful, we probably won't stick with the 
second. The third sounds like trouble

<No doubt about lu'i ro lo broda = lo'i broda. If lu'i piro
loi broda is also that, we don't have a way of talking of sets
whose members are masses. Not that it would be a problem for me
in any case. I only need {lu'a} and {lu'o} an these don't have
the problems that sets have.>

I suppose you mean "don't NOW have any way" since you were just proposing a 
way above. We pretty certainly don't have one now and I can imagine wanting 
one (without going through {gunma}), except that I want to insist that masses 
aren't things but rather that mass descriptions are ways of talking about 
things (set descriptions, too, for that matter)

<It seems useful to distinguish {lu'o so'i lo broda}, a mass of
many broda, from {lu'o so'u lo broda}, a mass of a few broda,
and so on.>
As noted, I would like to see those be just the massification of {so'i lo 
broda}, that is, not an unspecified mass of many broda but a mass of many 
unspecifed broda. I,m not sure I can make this work, what with quantifiers 
and all.