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la nitcion cusku di'e
sisku x2 may or may not be an abomination, but it is a fact of
Lojban. That said, the "I want to talk to a doctor/any doctor" is a
far far better illustration of this intensional doctor, because we
don't need to get sidetracked by {buska}. (Sorry, Jorge, but I do
think that backfired.)
I'm happy with it, because it gives me a formalisation
of {lo'ei} that I find very satisfying.
The two different readings of "I want to talk to a doctor"
are very easy to do in Lojban:
su'o da poi mikce zo'u mi djica lo'e nu mi tavla da
mi djica lo'e nu su'o da poi mikce zo'u mi tavla da
(Sorry to use {lo'e nu} there, but {le} just won't do.)
But if you want to use a predicate like "person x1 seeks
person x2", transparent, (which is not official {sisku}, call
it {buska} or whatever else you want) then you need something
like {lo'ei}.
Walk me through the last bit. Singularisation annuls opacity. So, an individual unsingularised population allows an ambiguity between "I need a/any doctor" and "there's this particular doctor I need" --- because in the former you're allowing arbitrary choice in a population on the spot (opacity), and in the latter the choice has been made way beforehand by the speaker (transparency). When you have a population of one --- and singularity does that --- there's no difference. So in "I need Mr Doctor", there's no distinction between choosing any one and having already chosen one; there's only one there. Right?
Exactly! [...]
In which case, we're back to a cmavo split. And we're also back to
deciding (a) which sense is more useful, so that it gets the shorter
cmavo lo'e; or alternatively (b) which sense is closer to the CLL
prescription, so that it keeps lo'e.
My opinion is still that (b) wins out, that the Median is closer to
the CLL's lion, and that something *like* {se ka} or {jai ka} would
be good for the intensional lo'e, since it would directly and
mnemonically tie in with the {sisku x2} (a fact on the Lojban ground.)
{se ka} = {poi'i} does not work for that. It still requires
an outer quantifier. {(su'o) lo se ka ce'u broda} =
{(su'o) lo broda}.
[...]
That said, Jorge had {lo'e xunre labno} living in the wilds of the
South, and {loi xunre labno} living in captivity.
I would have no problem with {lo'e xunrylabno} living in
captivity _and_ having its original home in the wilds of
the South. The piece I translated said that {pixaxa loi
xunrylabno} is living in captivity. I would ceratinly not
want to claim anything about {pixaxa lo'e xunrylabno}.
When talking about a fraction of all red wolves we have
to use {loi}. I would have used {picici loi} to say that
one third of them live in the wilds just as well.
[As an aside, I hesitated between {xunre labno} and
{xunrylabno}. Shouldn't we use the lujvo here, given that
we are not talking about wolves that happen to be red but
rather about a specific kind called "red wolf"? I'm never
quite sure about tanru.]
Which to me sound like my version of prototypical: "proper red wolves" live in the wilds of the South, "the mass of red wolves as we veridically know them" live in captivity. I think.
The text talked about the _original_ home of red wolves.
I don't know where this is going. "any doctor" and "the typical
doctor" are clearly separate things. Logicians may well have found
ways to conflate them; but I think we should keep them separated in
Lojban anyway, to avoid confusion. So if we accept that, we have to
pick whether fundamentalism or utility determines which keeps lo'e;
which one the baseline hints at; and whether some sort of {jai ka}
trick will work after all.
The {jai ka} trick will not work. I find that an intensional or
singulariser gadri is essential, whereas I don't see much use for
the statistical lo'e. I'm not very moved by fundamentalist
arguments. For me to stop using {lo'e} you'd have to give me
a very good substitute.
Perhaps. Like I say, though, I don't know that Mr Doctor is lo'e
mikce. In fact, I don't know yet that s/he isn't {loi mikce} after
all. Massification suppresses individuation, so the choosing of
opacity vs. transparency is sidestepped there too. Isn't it?
Yes, (whole) masses are singular and thus sidestep opacity vs. transparency, but only if you were really really sick would you need the whole mass of all doctors to work on your case (and you'd have to be very rich to pay them too, I doubt any social security would cover all that). mu'o mi'e xorxes _________________________________________________________________MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus