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la and cusku di'e
> Is the consensus then that "fractional quantifiers" are true > quantifiers? "piro" means "each bit of", and not "the largest > possible bit of" (="the whole")? I don't know if that's the consensus, but Lojbab persuaded me into this view (!!!). There are two reasons. The first is that if fractional quantifiers weren't true quantifiers then they would have to be abolished; that is, given the grammatical environments they occur in, they must be true quantifiers.
I'm not terribly persuaded by this reason.
The second reason is that it's difficult to see the difference between "each bit of" and "the whole" (and likewise for other fractions), unless, say, the "an x-sized bit of" has extra properties such as integrity of form, and if so then this is something that should be expressed by a selbri.
The difference that concerns me is that they behave differently with respect to scope issues. "The whole" yields a singular term, "each bit of" does not.
> That may be preferrable
> as long as there are no default quantifiers so that we can
> still refer to wholes.
I agree.
> But then how do we say "a large bit of",
> given that {piso'i} would mean "many bits of"?
{piso'i} would mean "*proportionally* many bits of", and hence
would be equivalent to "a large bit of".
They are not really equivalent. "There are many bits of
ice cream over there" is different from "there is
a large bit of ice cream over there". In the first
case, different bits might be of different flavours,
for example. I agree that a _collective_ of many
bits would be about equivalent to a large bit, but
we are not taking {piso'i} as a collective.
Could we perhaps make the distinction as:
{so'i fi'u}: "proportionally many bits of"
{pi so'i}: "a large bit of"?
Maybe {piso'i ...} = {loi so'ifi'u ...}?
mu'o mi'e xorxes
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