Re: Response to Randall Holmes on Loglan/Lojban "me"

[Randall Holmes <holmes@diamond.idbsu.edu>]

LeChevalier's proposed implementation of the technical sense of ME
which I propose does not work.  Again, I'm afraid I don't know
Lojban, so my examples are in Institute Loglan.

He suggests, in essence, that

Da me le mrenu

is equivalent to 

Da bi le mrenu.

This is not the case.  The first sentence means, roughly, 

X is one of the men currently designated by "le mrenu" (one of the men
I have in mind)

The second means

X is the man (the one I currently mean)

and if "the man" (le mrenu) has multiple reference, X is asserted to
be identical to each of its referents (and so this sentence will be
false if le mrenu has nontrivial multiple reference, in every case,
which is certainly not true for the first sentence).

Nothing in this analysis is changed by the fact that the Lojban
equality predicate has full grammatical privileges.  Suppose that
"prede" were a Loglan predicate meaning "is equal to":

Da prede je le mrenu

would mean roughly the same thing as

Da bi le mrenu

not

Da me le mrenu

which still means something quite different.

The fundamental point is that the technical sense of ME that I propose
is NOT "identity conversion"; it is conversion of multiple reference
into a predicate form (suitable for conversion to set reference, for
example).


					--Randall Holmes