lu'a

["John E. Clifford" <pcliffje@CRL.COM>]

xorxes:
There is no problem when the anaphora have a single referent,
those are the best sumti there are, they never give any trouble, long live
the singular reference!
pc:
Well, they ain't none in Lojban, but they are a lot easier when they is.
Well, hardly any. For the most part, we do have to deal with quantifiers
and scope and all that entails
xorxes:
Anaphorized references are a mess on their own right, and I hesitate to
enter into that before having a firm ground to step on.
pc:
Well, strike "reference,"  but it is easy to get less than desirable
results with some anaphora.  Still, remember that "anaphora" just means
repetition, so the basic plot is simple, however complicated working it
out may be.

xorxes:
        ko'a goi le re gerku .....
        ........
        ........
        i ko'a batci lo nanmu
What does the last sentence say? Does it say that each of the two
dogs bites its own man, or do they both bite necessarily the same one?
In English, a use of "they" there would suggest the same man, but that
can only be the case in Lojban if {ko'a} is the mass of the two dogs.

I think I would prefer that {goi} have this massifying effect, because
then all assigned variables would always have single referents, and it
would be much much simpler to deal with them. (In this case, the single
referent of {ko'a} would be the pair of dogs, one entity.)
pc:
If _goi_ is simply anaphorizing then, by the agreed upon interpretation
of le re gerku cu batci lo nanmu on the quantifier thread, the last
sentence allows each dog to pick its own man, i.e. two men might be
bitten.  And I can think of no good prior reason to think that _goi_
massifies or otherwise does more than introduce the anaphora marker of
choice.  Indeed, if it does massify then we get strange results with even
the relatively pure cases of individual: ti becomes the mass of this, for
example, even if this is not something easily massified (as individuals
often are not).  So, it looks like it will be hard to get both dogs to
hit on a single (well, at least a single) man.  Simply going to prenex
will not obviously help here, since that prenex is already buried in the
scope of a universal (I would say -- as Lojban does) and so cannot be
unsubordinated equivalently.  Maybe the leaper works, but I do not see
what consequences will follow if we say it does and this is an area of
strange kinds of dangers.  Further, we do not want the man to be totally
independent of this pair of dogs, as the leaper might all too easily
make him; even the one man is dependent upon which dogs they are.  There
is not (we hope) one man who gets bitten by whatever pair of dogs takes
to biting men.

        Oh for referential modes or Skolem functions! BTW the referent of
ko'a under the massifying effect of goi would not be the pair of dogs but
their mass, still one entity.  Notice then that in the massifying
interpretation ko'a batci lo nanmu would be true if only one dog bit only
one man, masses bein g the sort of things they are (note, NOT "the sort of
things pc has chosen to define them as").
xorxes:
If {goi} does massify (which I now think would be the best thing to do)
then {lu'o ko'a} would get a mass of the mass, which is as far as I can
tell indistinguishable from the simple mass, so that would even agree
with pc's theory.
pc:
The mass of a mass is, like the massification of other individuals, not
something of which we have a very clear sense.  It is different from the
original mass itself, since it has different components (it has only the
one, the mass, while the original mass has all the whatevers that were
brought together in it, typically more than one and surely not THIS mass).
(BTW, xorxes' interpretation of the lu'a series is starting to have a
number of useless forms, by his own admission, just as he claims the
more-or-less official version has.  Is there a different system here that
gets what xorxes wants without cluttering up the usefulness of lu'a,
etc. and which does not keep generating odd cases?)

xorxes:
Multiple reference will breed trouble.
pc:
So do singular ones, if anaphora is massifying.
pc>|83