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On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 4:08 PM, John E Clifford <kali9putra@hidden.email> wrote:
>
> Sorry, I don't understand the notion of picking bears in general. If we
> pick, we are no longer general; if general, then not picked. I don't see a
> good way to explicate this precisely without going into the notion of
> fascination and the characteristics of bears, but failing that, I have no
> problem with the sentence you offer. The "selected" bears may be a pretty
> amorphous bunch. And, of course, it may turn out that what John is
> fascinated by is not bears themselves -- they actually terrify him -- but
> facts and the like about bears, maybe even pictures of bears. All that
> comes out in the semantics of fascination, of course (but we mustn't mention
> that), as does the role that la crba play. As I said, there are very few
> problems with existing {lo}, so long as it is what it usually actually is
> and not some ghost without a machine.
Mike gave four examples that could be covered by l-:
la ma djni le crbe mncake
John is fascinated by bears.
la ma djni le crbe mrneka
John is shaped like a bear.
la ma djni le vdjte fntake
John invented the widget.
la ma djni le strcpe dsgnake
John designed a starship.
You said: "Well, if you think all of these are covered by l, it is
hardly surprising that the notion you have is incoherent to the point
of contradiction." Since you have no problem with the first one, you
must be objecting to at least one of the others, so use whichever one
you object to as an example for what I was saying.
> I am of two minds about the "each child kissed his/her mother". One is to
> deny that this is a case of lV at all, but rather (as it usually would be in
> logic, if not in Lojban) just something with rV and/or sV ra [child]a re
> mmteka [kiss]ake (sorry, I'm blanking on vocabulary today and my cheat
> sheet is two floors away). The other is the lambda approach, which I
> suspect goes against &'s strange restrictions (insofar as I understand
> them), but which seems to provide a general escape -- for there will surely
> be cases not so readily dealt with.
If you like "ra vrba re/se mmteka cnbake" you can always use that, but
that doesn't tell us anything about l-. Would you want to say that "ra
vrba le mmteka cnbake" is meaningless, because l- can't be moved to
leftmost position, or what?
ma'a xrxe