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| In a message dated 11/6/2002 7:27:57 PM Central Standard Time, jjllambias@hidden.email writes: << [pc] >Suppose our three men are a, b and c. Then {pisu'o lei ci nanmu cu bevri >le >pipno} >amounts to { abu po'o bevri le pipno [A] ija by po'o bevri le pipno [B] ija >cy po'o bevri le pipno [C] ija abu joi by bevri le pipno [D] ija by joi cy >bevri le pipno [E] ija abu joi cy bevri le pipno [F] ija abu joi by joi cy >bevri le pipno [G]} I don't agree it amounts to that. It amounts to G only. >> Well, suppose tht the three carry the piano three blocks: a and b carry it the first block, b and c the second and a and c the third. Surely this is lei ci nanmu carried it three blocks. Now subtract the three blocks: thy're just clowing around in the warehouse one afternoon and a and b pick up the piano and carry it around a bit, then b and c do, then a and c. This still seems to be a case of lei ci nanmu carrying the piano exactly as before and in this case, each submass fulfills the same condition as the whole mass. As I said, the difference seems to be between activities and processes here. My intuition doesn't extend very reliably to states, but my first inclination is to align them with processes. << ). If we move on to {pira'eci lei ci nanmu cu bevri le pipno} >can >only mean {A ija B ija C}. I think that would correspond to {su'o pira'eci lei nanmu ...}. >> And ordinarily {pira'eci lei nanmu} is {ro pira'eci lei nanmu}, that is, A ije B ije C? This seems very odd. Every member of the mass has done the deed by himself, but the mass has not: what happened to the additive principle -- or does that only apply to {loi}? << You'd need XOR instead if ija, however it is that we do three way XOR in Lojban. I'm assuming that fractional quantifiers are exact too, so that one third is just one third and not at least one third. >> OK --though I can't for the life of me remember how that goes -- except that it involves repetitions of components or a device (which I can't find anywhere) for clustering sentences and then specifying properties on the whole set: "exactly one of" being the desideratum here. << The second might be true, depending on context, but the first must be true. >> I think we just disagree here. I think that the first must be included in any expansion and whether the second is or not depends upon what is being expanded -- do submasses have exactly the same property as the whole mass? Here I do think that the OR is sufficient, since doing it a variety of ways does not seem to change matters at all, each is sufficient. << For me, a piro-mass is a simple singular term. Very easy to work with and useful. >> That is quite correct, but not the point at issue -- it is not an individual term of the kind that allows logical operations, like instantiation or even generalization. |