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xorxes:
> la and cusku di'e
>
> > > I think this idea may come from the fact that {loi broda}
> > > is almost always translated to English as "the mass of broda"
> > > This translation is obviously incompatible with {pisu'o
> > > loi broda} = "some part of the mass of all broda"
> >
> >Yes, but not just this. If "piro" means "the whole of" and
> >"piroloi" means "the whole of the mass of", then it stands to
> >reason that "loi" means "the mass of"
>
> No, {piro} means "the whole of the" and "pisu'o" means
> "some part of the". Then {loi} just means "mass" and cannot
> be used without an explicit or implicit quantifier
>
> This is analogous to {rolo} and {su'olo}. "lo" means just
> "individual", and you need to precede it with "each" or with
> "some" to make sense of it. ("each of the", "at least one of the")
>
> "loi" is not "the mass", and "lo" is not "the individual"
The difference between these two, which are indeed analogous in
Lojban, is that there is no independent that "lo" logically
could have. There is no such thing as "the individual". But there
is such a thing as "the mass of all", even if Lojban has no
ready way to express the notion.
There is no reason why "piPA" should mean "the whole of the"
rather than "the whole of", other than that gloss makes better
sense of the obligatoriness of the piPA before loi.
> >It can't be that the word {loi} means "some part of the mass
> >of", for "piroloi" does not mean "the whole of some part of
> >the mass of"
>
> That's correct. The "some part" bit is exclusively contained in
> the default implicit quantifier
>
> >Unfortunately, the only way to use the word {loi} so that it
> >refers to the mass and not part of the mass is to add {piro}
> >in front of it
>
> Yes. Unfortunately, CLL and Lojban literature in general is
> plagued with translations of {loi} as "the" mass, which is
> the cause of a lot of misunderstanding
>
> Other than this unfortunate mistranslation, I still think
> that pisu'o as the default for loi is the right one because
> it is very infrequently that we want to speak of the whole
> mass of broda, at least in its collective sense
I, on the other hand, think that we are better off without
piPA. {loi} would simply be a massification or collectivization
of lo'i. To talk of a mass or collective of some broda, then
you could use lu'o su'o.
--And.