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

[John Cowan <cowan@LOCKE.CCIL.ORG>]

la dilyn. cusku di'e
> 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])

Correct.

> [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?

You say "re lu'a le nanmu ce le ninmu ce le verba [lu'u]"; this is one
of the functions of the lu'a-lu'o-lu'i group.  You should use "ce",
making a set, rather than "joi", making a mass, so that the parts will
split up as you expect, rather than as (say) "The man's ear and the mass
of the the woman's nose and the boy's duodenum."  (Contra Jorge, there
are several clear-cut uses for sets in Lojban.)

> 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?

That isn't the right parse.  It's (pa (le re (le ci ninmu))), an outside
quantifier followed by the special description type LE+quantifier+sumti.

> {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

No, that is two sumti and asserts nothing.  It says "some of the three
men that exist; inside the room."  To bind it into one sumti, change it
to:

        lo ci ninmu be ne'i le kumfa

meaning "some of the three women-in-the-room", where "woman-in-the-room"
is a nonce predicate with the usual places of "ninmu" plus an extra
"within" place.

> as a sumti by itself;

Even if this were a single sumti, it would not be an assertion of
existence.  A solitary sumti is mostly useful for completing a previous
bridi, especially a sumti question.

> 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

No, that means (insofar as it means anything), "The quantity of (part of the
mass of all women) equalling the number three within the room."  There is
no selbri within "loi nanmu ne'i le kumfa", so the "ni" abstraction extends
to the end, and its selbri is "du".

> or
>         loi nanmu ne'i le kumfa cu cimei

That works if you add "be" before "ne'i", and maybe even if you don't, but
the scoping is strange.

> or maybe
>         da noi te cimei nanmu ne'i le kumfa

No selbri here.

> or
>         ci da nanmu ne'i le kumfa

The means "Three things are women within the room" and is the best yet.

> 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?

No selbri.

> (Or
> maybe that should be
>         cimei nanmu ne'i le kumfa
> and we should just use this tanru instead of the inside quantifiers.

This is an observation sentence:  "Lo, a threesome of women within the room."
and it works.  However, "nanmu cimei" would be more Lojbanic.

> 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.

What the devil would you expect it to mean?  "My you is expressed?"  The
construct "le mi" expects a selbri, not a sumti.  Or do you mean "mi do
se cusku", which means "I am expressed by you"?  That doesn't make much
sense either.

> 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?

Not much.  Forcing two things into the same place is usually useless.

>  > 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?

Nothing.  It's an artifact of the symmetrical treatment of FA and BAI/tense.

> 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.

We're not at a stage where a rewrite is acceptable.  This is a stage
many new and enthusiastic learners go through.  First, however, it's
important to learn what has already been defined; it turns out to be
more subtle than you expect.  (I speak from experience.)

--
John Cowan                                              cowan@ccil.org
                        e'osai ko sarji la lojban.