Quantifiers (was Re: A modest proposal #2: verdicality)

[DPT@HUMA1.BITNET]

jorge@phyast.pitt.edu writes:
di'e preti fi mi
 > > {xu}
 > > Quantifiers can be used before sumti, yielding a sumti; after a cmavo
 > > of selma'o LE, modifying the quantifier; and before a selbri (bridi?),
 > > yielding a sumti.

la xorxes. di'u di'e spuda
 > That's a strange way to put it. Better start from the full form:
 >
 >         <quantifier1> LE <quantifier2> <selbri>
 >
 > <quant1> is the real quantifier, <quant2> is only a cardinality marker,
 > it says out of how many you are quantifying.

A quantifier can go in front of most any sumti, not just one with a LE
or LA selma'o (anybody mind if I start calling these articles?), right?
That's why I phrased it as above.  (From the grammar, it appears that
you can't have a quantifier before a sumti joined with connectives, but
anywhere else will do.[1])

[1] Which leads me to ask:  how would I say:  "two of the man, the woman
and the child" (as a sumti)?  "The man, the woman, and the child" is

        le nanmu joi le ninmu joi le verba

How do I select two of them?

 > ... <etc.; thanks for the explanation.  But at the moment I'm
 >      mainly conerned about the grammar, not semantics> ...
 > Now, the short form {<quantifier> <selbri>} really means
 > {<quantifier> lo ro <selbri>}. So {re prenu} means "two of all those
 > that are a person".
 >
 > > There's also some weird use which seems to yield a
 > > selbri, as in {pa le re le ci ninmu}, whatever that means.)
 >
 > That's a sumti, it's an extension of the above: "one of the two of the
 > three women". Of the three women you have in mind, you are selecting
 > two, and then saying something about one of them. But notice that
 > the last selection is not the same as the others, you are claiming
 > something about one of the two, but not selecting which one.
 > {le pa le re le ci ninmu} on the other hand, does select which one.
 > Of course, all this nesting of selections would be quite confusing in
 > actual use, so it probably won't be very common.
                     ^^^^^^^^

{pi'e} This is the only good news in this letter:  I take it that this
form has not been used much?  Good, let's ditch it.

To me, {pa le re le ci ninmu} looks like a total bastard.  If {re le ci
ninmu} is a sumti, what are you doing putting {le} in front of it?  I
thought {le} was the form for converting a selbri to a sumti--what's it
doing twice here?

{le ci ninmu} is almost as bad.  When I first saw it, I thought {ci
ninmu} was a unit--but no, this is really indecomposable.  Consider:  to
say "there are three men in the room" I can say

.i lo ci nanmu ne'i le kumfa

as a sumti by itself; but to make a bridi, I need to rewrite this, in
one of the following ways:
        le ni loi nanmu ne'i le kumfa du li ci
or
        loi nanmu ne'i le kumfa cu cimei
or maybe
        da noi te cimei nanmu ne'i le kumfa
or
        ci da nanmu ne'i le kumfa
Umm.  I'm not sure which of these mean what I want.  In any case, my
point is that there's this syntax for implicitly making a claim about
the number of ways to fill in variables to make a sumti true, without
any corresponding syntax for filling in the places of a bridi.  Why
can't
        ci nanmu ne'i le kumfa
mean "There are men in the room (three of them)" or some such?  (Or
maybe that should be
        cimei nanmu ne'i le kumfa
and we should just use this tanru instead of the inside quantifiers.
Yes, I'm starting to like this.)

I've been studying the syntax of sumti.  It is, to put it mildly, a
mess.  Did you know {le mi do se cusku} is ungrammatical?  Neither did
I.  There are other unintended consequences, as Jorge pointed out in
another message (twice):

mi puva cusku di'e
 > > I think I see why {plini} has a place for "planetary characteristics"; so
 > > you could say, e.g., {le fi le xunre ku plini} to mean Mars.  But again,

la xorxes cusku di'e
 > That's not grammatical, you mean {le plini be fi le xunre}, however, it
 > does seem to be a reasonable construction. I don't know if it would
 > cause problems, but if it doesn't, perhaps it should be made grammatical.

This should almost certainly be grammatical.  One problem is the
meaning of {le fa le brode ku broda}, but that already exists: what
does {le broda be fa le brode} mean?

 > BTW, strangely enough, {le pe fi le xunre ku plini} is grammatical, but
 > with {be} instead of {pe} it isn't.

What on earth is {le pe fi le xunre ku plini} supposed to mean?

Anyway, IMHO the syntax of sumti needs both rethinking and debugging.
>From the state of this part of the grammar, I'd guess that it's
{puta'e} been patched; I think a rewrite rather than further patching
is in order.

mu'o mi'e. dilyn.