WikiDiscuss

1. How Whorfian! To me it is a matter of expreience: I have met rabbits and myself. I can extract stages from myself (or a rabbit) by analysis though not experience them as such (I've tried for half my life as a student of Buddhism but no go — fortunately the Buddhists I know admit they cqan't either or not for more than a flash). I cannot at all, by synthesis, get Mr. Rabbit from rabbits. So, I have some doubts about stages, none about people or rabbits, and quite a few about Mr. Rabbit, however defined or described.

2. Nice one! In that case the quantifiers are no better than any other device. We need a general solution for this and I never can decide or get an agreement about the best one — or just to pick one (intensional contexts, outer domain quantification, to name the two easiest)

3. I am not sure that I agree that {lo} ever was equivalent to {su'o} and certtainly that fact alone wouldn't justify changing it, unless there were a new, closely related function that needed doing. So far the functions proposed seem either not new or not related. Appeal to Loglan {lo} will have no effect on me (or others who were in that world) than to convince us that your {lo} is inciherent if not contradictory — the status of Loglan {lo} when last I checked.

4: That this is new {lo} is less than clear, BPFK was supposed to clarify and regularize existing forms, not introduce innovations — except to acheve those mentioned tasks. This is new and surely does nothing for either of the set purposes. If you are doing something else, you should announce it loud and clear at the beginning.

5: Yes, fooled by English cleft sentence constructions Lojban creators brook up the single thread of those notions into two places — less drastically in this case than in some others perhaps, but still creating a messy situation. You cannot, for example, officially anaphorize the sumti behind {tu'a} with a coreferential pronoun (you can with a literal one, of couse, but then it means something different. Notice that the third place is also intensional so the {lo tanxe} doesn't create any problem here except that, being in a different intensional context, it cannot be hooked up to the earlier one (I suppose the ideal embedded predicate is {pilno}, which I would use if I wanted to express purpose).

6: but lo ractu does not ractu — no ractu has instances but, at least for now, lo ractu does (How would you say that in Lojban, by the way). I still think you are trying to have things both ways — a constant that does exactly the work of a variable — and very little you have said convinces me otherwise (even leads me to consider it).

Jorge Llambías <jjllambias2000@yahoo.com.ar> wrote:
pc:
> F:But the disanalogy is stronger-- one is the product of analysis, the other
> of synthesis, which require very different sorts of things. We know that the
> totality exists and have doubts about the stages in the one case; we jknow
> that the instances exist but have doubts about the totality in the other.

1.I don't have more doubts about the stages than the individual, or
about the kind than the instances. They are all artifacts of language
to me. Maybe that's why we can't seem to understand each other.

> L: But the paradox disappears completely with quantification (one of the
> reasons for its development, in fact). {su'o pavyseljirna na zasti}

2. What about {su'o pavyseljirna cu xanri}?

> M: But why do you think that {lo ractu} old style would be used to say
> something about the class of rabbits or the collective of rabbits or whatever
> it is that you seem to think "rabbits" refers to in English/ {lo} makes a
> lousy tense marker, too, but that is not a reason to replace it; it is a
> reason to get a tense marker that does what is wanted.

3. {lo} was redundant in its function, being equivalent to {su'o},
so it was the logical choice. Also, there's the historical conexion
to Loglan {lo}. Also, the simplest gadri should be the most general
one. {lo} is to gadri as {cu} is to tenses.

> If what you say about the {lo} examples — I have to admit I stopped at {...
> nitcu lo ...}, then the gadri page is in worse shape than even I thought,
> since, by your description, it gives as exemplary cases of {lo} things that
> are not (clearly, generally agreed) cases of {lo} at all.

4:They are examples of the proposed lo, of course. This is the adrees
of the page, in case you want to discuss actual examples:
http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=BPFK+Section%3A+gadri

> Byt the way, somehwere earlier you called {tu'a lo ractu} vague. It is, of
> course, since it omits information about what I want/need/etc. for

5:Both {djica} and {nitcu} have an x3 for "for", so the vagueness
of tu'a is of a different sort. For example:

mi nitcu tu'a lo tanxe lo nu mi punji lo cukta ty(?)
I need (something about) a box so that I put some books in it(?)

The "something" is probably "having it". I'm not sure if the {ty}
is correct here. Can you refer to a quantified something that's
inside a different abstraction?

> dreamed about it and so on. But this is marked less vague than {lo ractu} in
> your usage, which also omits all that information (and does not even indicate
> that it may be significant) but plunks us down with something that is not
> even a rabbit (or is only in an indirect sort of way).

6:lo ractu does, of course, ractu. {mi nitcu lo tanxe lo nu mi punji
lo cukta ty} is simply "I need a box to put books in it", no more vague
than that.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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