BPFK Section: Logical Variables
In the light of this regrettably overlong
discussion (my apologies again), the original
sentence raises some interesting points. The
natural reading of {pa da broda} as a plural
quantifier in McKay's system would be in effect
"there are broda which are one in number," which
would be true whenever there are broda. On the
other hand, the Lojban intention is "the broda
are one in number" which is a different claim
altogether and clearly not equivalent to your
right-hand-side formula. This raises the
interesting possibility of finding a significant
(i.e., semantic rather than pragmatic) difference
between {da poi broda} and {lo broda}: one of
them is global (about the broda), the other local
(about some broda of interest). The logically
natural move would be to take the quantifier
expressions as global and the descriptors as
local, but everyone claims that Lojban usage goes
the opposite way. This is unfortunate, since the
local case is the one that needs the kinds of
things that {lo} allows (partitive
quantification, size independent of the number of
broda and also dependent) and the universal does
not (it shifts to the local for all those moves).
Of course, these distinctions may not make as
much difference if we introduce modals for
"generally" and the like.