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Nick: > cu'u la xorxes > > > la nitcion cusku di'e > > > > >xod said in English "if only you guys hadn't hijacked tu'o to mean > > >Unique, we could use it to indicate the inner quantifier of > > >substances." And immediately said "good idea." I now think it isn't > > > > They are both cases where the grammar provides a slot to be > > filled with a number, but where no number will do > > Maybe so; but the number 'won't do' for different reasons. And if Kinds > end up inner quantifiers (quantifying over subkinds), tu'o becomes > ambiguous between Kind (uncounted) and Substance (uncountable) As I say in another message, both Kind and Sunstance are uncounted -- I would say they both have cardinality tu'o, along with everything else that there is only ever one of. Bit of Substance is fractionally quantifiable, and I would agree that it always has cardinality ci'ipa. > > In XS4 there is a use for quantifiers to quantify over subkinds, > > though. So if there is a gadri for Kind, we can find a way to > > interpret a quantifier in front of it. When I proposed tu'o > > for Unique we were working under the assumption that there is > > always a default quantifier, so something like tu'o was needed > > to cancel it. If there is no default quantifier, there is no > > reason to assume that {lo broda} is quantified > > But tu'o lo broda is an explicit signal that there is no > quantification. XS says by default, lo broda = [tu'o] lo broda, rather > than [su'o] lo broda. So even if there isn't a semantic quantifier, > there is still a syntactic quantifier > > I'd rather have an explicit mark for "this is not quantified"; and tu'o > does so admirably I'm with xorxes on this. We all hate zi'o because it makes us indicate the absence of something by means of marking it with a presence. So a KS could insist on always using a zi'o, but then it would genuinely be kludgesome. > I realise I still have a confusion: I am making piro loi broda be every > single possible portion, and that's not true; piro is the entire > substance. So I need to modify my interpretation of fractional > quantification; it is not over bits of the substance, but over the > substance Good -- another respect in which we are converging. Me and xorxes say that you don't quantify over the substance. You need a gadri expression equivalent to "da poi broda-stuff" where poi is not read as restricted quantification -- i.e. where it is logically equivalent to "da broda-stuff". > Damn. I want to indicate somewhere that there are aleph-null bits to > the substance, but that's not quite what piro = whole of means. And > piromei is, in fact, an atomic property (though pisu'o mei is not.) > Aargh. Back to drawing board on this, too Good news, then. > .... No, hang on, I've got it > > A collective of all humanity is piro loi ji'i6ki'oki'oki'o remna, ok? Do we have to agree? You can stipulate that this is what it means, but as a compositionalist I think it *should* mean "1 in every 1 member of the collective of c. 6bn humans". The way I think the collective *should* be expressed is {(tu'o) loi ji'i6ki'oki'oki'o remna}. Or {(tu'o) lu'o ji'i6ki'oki'oki'o remna}. Clearly this would not be SL-conformant, but SL is a balls-up. > What's the cardinality of humanities? I mean, there are 6G humans, so a > human being is one out of 6G. How many all-of-humanities is this an > all-of-humanity of? > > The question's meaningless, right? There is only one all-of-humanity, > just as there is only one all-of-water. As you say, no individuals > within the all-of-water to quantify > > If there is only one all-of-humanity, what's the 6G doing in there (or > for that matter the ro?) The inner quantifier isn't telling you the > cardinality of groups, the way lo 6ki'oki'o tells you the cardinality > of individual humans. No, the inner quantifier tells you how many > possible atomic bits there are to quantify over, using the fractional > quantifier > > So the inner quantifier of a lojbanmass gives you not the cardinality > of the mass, but of the bits of the mass. Right. But the same is true of sets. {lo'i ci broda} doesn't tell you how many sets of broda there are; it tells you how many broda there are. > In a collective, the inner > quantifier tells you there are cisinfinite bits over which the > fractional quantifier quantifies. yes > piro means you are picking, not all > possible fractions of the collective, but the fraction of the > collective which contains all the individual bits Yes. So really it's functioning as an inner quantifier and means "lu'o ro fi'u ro". --And.