WikiDiscuss

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> 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)

(Re: lo pavyseljirna e la meripapnz cu xanri}
Whatever the solution is, it will apply to Mr Unicorn and to Mary Poppins
in the same way.

> 3. I am not sure that I agree that {lo} ever was equivalent to {su'o} and

But then, what is the old lo you keep talking about if not the one
equivalent to su'o???

> 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.

OK. In any case, you are fully justified in opposing the new {lo} on
the grounds that it goes against Lojban traditional understanding of it.
I don't really want to argue the political side of it, just the technical
one.

> 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.

There was a large enough consensus that the gadri system as it was needed
fixing. You are more than welcome to propose another way of doing it, but
it has to be more than a sketch, you have to show how to deal with all
the tough cases. It's not enough to claim it can be done, you have to show
how it's done, with concrete examples.

> 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.

(Re: third place of nitcu/djica)
When we use the language, we have to deal with the messy situation,
so it is not enough to say that it could have been done better, we
have to show how to deal with it as it is.

> 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).

So what do you propose we do about it?

> 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).

But rabbits do rabbit, and that's what {lo ractu cu ractu} means.

As for the rest, I'm not sure, but wouldn't every ractu be an instance
(the only instance) of itself? I'm just pondering aloud here, I know
what your answer will be.

In any case, in a more general case, instances of one kind can in
turn be a kind with its own instances: for example rabbits as a kind
are an instance of animals. (Each rabbit is also an instance, of course.)

I think {mupli} could be used for "x1 is an instance of x2", modifying
its place structure a bit, and {klesi} for subkinds, so:

ta mupli lo ractu
That's an instance of rabbits.

lo ractu cu klesi lo danlu
Rabbits are a kind of animal.

> 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).

As long as it does the work, what's the problem?

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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