WikiDiscuss

Posted by pycyn on Tue 09 of Nov, 2004 00:59 GMT posts: 2388

wrote:
pc xorxes
> > > ro lo sruri be le dinju cu dasni lo crino
> > > mapku
> > > Each of those surrounding the building
> wore a
> > > green hat.
> >
> > But then there is nothing satisfying the
> sortal,
> > since no individual surrounds the building --
> or
> > are you covertly shifting to "is involved in
> > surrpounding the building"?
>
> No, no shifting. {lo sruri} is a plural
> constant, and
> {ro} is a singular quantifier over the
> referents:
> {ro da poi ke'a me lo sruri ...}

Well, {lo sruri} is not a constant if it means
anything at all like lojban {lo sruri} (I do feel
we are back to xorban again), since Lojban likes
to be able to deal with cses where the members of
a groups (or whatever) do not act in perfect
concert.
If {lo sruri} is a plural anything then, since it
can play term roles with {da}, {da} must be a
plural variable. But I suppose that you mean
plural in the sense McKay wants to avoid, namely
getting a bunch together in some single item
(this still doesn't quite work right because of
the Lojban rules about how these singulars enter
preication). The role of {ro} also shifts here,
parallelling that of predicates generally — that
is it goes for members (not, as in Lojban, for
subgroups). And, of course, there is the problem
of distributivity, which is either unmarked or is
in {ro}, neither a veryfruitful way of doing it
(though each can be made to work with a little
fiddling — none of which I have seen yet).
>
> > I don't see what is
> > wrong with the usual Lojban {lo sruri be le
> dinju
> > cu dasni lo crino mapku}.
>
> I don't see a thing wrong with that either. The
> {ro} can
> be added to guarantee a distributive reading,
> but {lo sruri}
> by itself is neither distributive nor
> non-distributive.
> Perhaps calling it "usual Lojban" is
> exaggerated though,
> because CLL would have it mean {su'o lo sruri
> ...}.

Well, here we have adopted something from you --
or someone — to the effect that the usual
quantifier on {lo} is {ro}, now that the internal
default is not {ro}.

> > > PA sumti = PA da poi ke'a me sumti
> > >
> > > where {da} is an individual variable.
> > >
> > So, {lo broda} is a set or a group or some
> such
> > thing and we have to unpack all the
> predicates in
> > separate ways to interpret them.
>
> {lo broda} is any number of things that broda,
> usually
> not a set nor a reified group.

You really do have to decide whether there are
plural (and primarily plural incidentally)
variables or not. You can't even claim that
something is a plural constant without those
variables. And once you have them they are
either everywhere or most things have to be done
twice because the singular variables behave
almsot exactly like the plural — grammatically.