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de'i li 2002-11-10 ti'u li 02:45:00 la'o zoi. And Rosta .zoi cusku di'e >> If you're talking about a different world, then 'su'o' and 'ro' will >> quantify over the individuals in that world; this is a different issue >> and not relevant to the existential import of ro. I want to make claims >> about things *in this world* which may turn out to not exist. > >I don't understand. Do you or don't you want to claim that they exist in >this world? I don't know whether they exist, but I still want to make claims about them. >> For >> example, I may want to make a claim about all even prime numbers >> greater than 2. (This isn't a great example, but I'm sure that math is >> a subject where making claims about things which may turn out not to >> exist is very common.) > >That one's easy: ro da ga na gi. No matter what system we choose, we can get all the possibilities with some circumlocution or another. I prefer A-E-I+O+ because it seems to be the simplest and most general system. >That's not a claim about all even prime numbers greater than 3, though; >it's more like a claim about things in general, and about the property of >being an even prime number greater than 3. The example was not an especially good one, since everyone knows that there are no even prime numbers greater than two. The point I was trying to make was that one might want to define a set of mathematical objects in a certain way, and then prove statements about the members of that set before one has proven that the set is not empty. Hence non-importing ro. >Might you want to make a claim about "most even prime numbers greater >than 3" or "some even prime numbers greater than 3"? I expect you >would, if you want to make claims about all of them. I would refrain from making claims which have existential import before I know whether the thing under discussion does in fact exist. >> I may want to say "ro dincfu je du'atce jbopre >> cu mutce le ka sidju la lojban." The subject term there is probably >> empty, but nevertheless I think it's a true statement, and would be a >> true statement if the subject term were not empty > >If I read that as meaningful, I read it as saying that in a world >like this one but with rich generous lojbanists, every single >one of them is a great help to Lojban. If you explicitly indicated >that you were making the claim only about this world, then I >would conclude that you believed there to be rich generous lojbanists. You would conclude wrong, since I have said multiple times that my use of ro does not have existential import. >If I knew that you believed there aren't rich generous lojbanists, >then I would have no idea at all what you meant; I'd probably read >it as a joke, the point being that it superficially looks meaningful, >and seems to be claiming that lojbanists are helping lojban, but >when you think further, you realize that that's not the case so >read it as a jokey way of saying that no lojbanists are rich and >generous. I may not know whether any such people exist. For all I know, there may be someone rich giving money to the LLG anonymously or someone has in the past. The point is that I neither need nor want to ascertain that before making the statement. >> At any rate, I >> intend to use ro without existential import, since that's how I tend to >> use 'all', etc. in natural languages > >I don't think we do, actually. When I earlier argued that English >"every" is nonimporting, I was misunderstanding importingness. >I haven't been able to think of any use of "every" that is >nonimporting in the sense that turns out to be the relevant one. I am fairly certain that most English speakers would consider "every" to be importing, but that is not where I got my usage. My usage is a habit that I got from studying Lojban, math, and logic. At any rate, we could say that any quantifier implicates any other quantifier, but what is the point of that? In English, "some" implicates "more than one" and "not all"; should "su'o" therefore implicate "za'u[pa]" and "me'i[ro]"? Why would you make a statement about some brodas if in fact it is true of all brodas? Why would you make a statement about some brodas if in fact it is true of exactly one broda? mu'o mi'e .adam.