Re: lei xau-dja-sei

[And Rosta <a.rosta@UCLAN.AC.UK>]

I don't want to flog a dead horse here, but here goes anyway...

Jorge:
> > > le remei po'u pa fraso ku joi pa dotco
> > > The couple which is a french and a german.
> > I think the answer is that there is no general way of saying,
> > say, "the/some footballers who are Welsh, Scottish, Irish and
> > English".
> The above does generalize:
>
>        lei jmabolkei po'u lo selnatmrkimri ku joi lo skoto ku
>        joi lo selnatmrxeire ku joi lo glico
>        The footballers who are at least one Welsh + at least
>        one Scottish + at least one Irish + at least one English.
> That works. But you probably want the individual form:

I want a form that is independent of the gadri. I.e. a form that
defines a class of people some of whom are Welsh, some of whom
are Irish, some of whom are Scottish, and some of whom are English
(not "glico", incidentally - that appears to denote anglophone
culture rather than the culture of England).

>        le jmabolkei po'u lo selnatmrkimri a lo skoto
>        a lo selnatmrxeire a lo glico
>        Each of the footballers who is a Welsh or a Scottish
>        or an Irish or an English.
>
> I think that one works, too.

No - it would allow the footballers to all only be Welsh.

> > > >            le ga mamta be la xorxes gi mamta be la and
> > > Well, it would if that were grammatical, but it isn't.
> > In a brief scan of my home mahoste & the www refgram I
> > cannot find how to do forethought sumti tail connection.
> > I thought GA was okay pretty well everywhere.
> There is no way of doing sumti tail connection, forethought or
> afterthought. You could use tanru connection for a similar
> effect:
>        le gu'a mamta be la xorxes gi mamta be la and

Cor! No way of doing sumti tail connection? Whyever not, I
wonder. I've been doing it for ages. It seems like a bit of
a gaping hole... Is there a rationale for it? What can one
say instead, that is literally equivalent? Are "le da voi",
"lei da voi" possible?

> > > > (Same goes for "children of xorxes and and".)
> > >  roda po'u lu'a la xorxes ce la and zo'u le panzi be da
> > >  For all x which is a member of {Jorge, And}: The children of
x.
> > > Can't think of a nice and short form.
> > Would
> >     ro da po`u la xorxes a la and zou le panzi be da
> > work?
> Yes!! At least I think it does. The prenex part is just like
> the footballers example, isn't it?

I think they;re different. But they'd be the same if you changed
the footballers example to "ro jmabolkei" (which, though, is not
a solution to the problem I've been posing).

> > > Let's say you want "the people
> > > are French and German", and you insist on using "le prenu"
rather
> > > than "lei prenu" for "the people". Then I don't know.
> > That was what set me off originally. I was trying to do an
English
> > phrase that seemed trivially straightforward and then ran into
> > this snag.
> Yes, I don't know how to do that one. With lei it is trivial, but
> if we want to make the individual claims it is much tougher. The
> logical claim is:
>        le prenu cu fraso gi'a dotco
>        ije su'o le prenu cu fraso
>        ije su'o le prenu cu dotco
>        Each of the people is French or German
>        and at least one of them is French
>        and at least one of them is German.
> But I don't know how to condense that into a simple phrase.

Fair enough, because you can't condense it in predicate logic,
as far as I can tell - it has to be spelled out as you've done.
But English does allow the condensed reading, so I thought
maybe Lojban might have found a way. In a way it's a shame it
didn't, because I bet that everyone is going to feel that
it is too long-winded to use Lojban as a logical language.
Indeed, Lojbab has thrown the weight of his prestigious usage
not behind the baseline but against it and the idea that
every utterance should be logically unambiguous. (At least
that's how I interpreted his remarks. The alternative
interpretation is that he was merely making the point that
it's possible to say X as a means to communicate Y, where
the speaker really wishes to assert not X but Y.)

And