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

[Jorge Llambias <jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU>]

> I think you are still cheating.  Of course, everything in the world
> including any single one of those men is an element of some set with
> three elements:  all that your sentence says is that each of the men
> you have in mind (however many there are!) is an element of some set
> with three elements (which is vacuously true if there are three
> distinct objects in the world).

I've lost track of what the original phrase was, but to say:

"The set of men I have in mind has three elements", you can say

        lu'i le nanmu cu se cimei
        The set of the men is a three element set


> It really is a nontrivial logical
> maneuver to construct a predicate which applies to each of the objects
> currently referred to by "le mrenu"; it is also useful, as I have
> tried to point out.

I think {du lu'a} does work like that in Lojban:

        la lojbab du lu'a le nanmu
        Lojbab is one (or more) of all the men (I have in mind)

but of course the normal way would be

        la lojbab du pa le nanmu
        Lojbab is one of the men

or more explicitly

        la lojbab du pa le ci nanmu
        Lojbab is one of the three men

In any case, {du lu'a} seems to do in Lojban what you want ME to do
in Loglan, if I understood correctly.


> The fundamental error is thinking that "le mrenu" can refer to the
> whole collection of people it designates in any one occurrence; but
> this is not the case.  Any sentence with le mrenu is a conjunction of
> sentences each of which says something about one of the designated
> men.  There is one pre-ME construction which allows one to express a
> fact about the collection of designated men:  we can say something
> like "le te mrenu" and tell how many there are.  But that is the only
> loophole.

{lu'a le nanmu} may be a way out. It is not a predicate, however, but
another sumti.

>
>                                         --Randall
>

Jorge