Lojban In General

Lojban In General


ci gerku ce'e re nanmu

Use this thread to discuss the ci gerku ce'e re nanmu page.

In section <http://jbotcan.org/cllc/c16/s7.html>, CLL says:

<<
Terms (which are either sumti or sumti prefixed by tense or modal
tags) that are grouped into a termset are understood to have equal
scope:

7.5) ci gerku ce'e re nanmu cu batci
nu'i ci gerku re nanmu nu'u cu batci
Three dogs plus two men, bite.

which picks out two groups, one of three dogs and the other of two
men, and says that every one of the dogs bites each of the men.
>>

I have two problems with this. The first one is with this definition
of "equal scope", but I will leave that for another post. The second
problem is that this use of termsets causes an ambiguity.

The primary use of termsets appears when connecting two bridi that
share the same selbri (and possibly some sumti). For example, given:

(1) ci gerku re nanmu cu batci
(2) re mlatu ci ninmu cu batci

We can connect them with a logical quantifier:

(3) ci gerku re nanmu cu batci .ije re mlatu ci ninmu cu batci

and because they share the same selbri, we can use termsets
so as not to repeat the selbri:

(4) ci gerku ce'e re nanmu pe'eje re mlatu ce'e ci ninmu cu batci

(This actually ends up being a bit longer than the unreduced
sentence, but if there had been more terms in common we might
have gained something, for example if both sentences had an
additional {ca lo purlamdei cerni}.)

But now what is the scope of the quantifiers in {ci gerku ce'e re nanmu}?
Originally it was the ordinary scope, with the second in the scope of the
first, but now they are grouped into a termset, does that mean that (4) is
not after all equivalent to (3)? If so, this secondary use of termsets
has eliminated the primary use. If (3) and (4) are equivalent, then termsets
cannot always be used to get equal scope, and we don't have a reduced
form for:

(5) ci gerku ce'e re nanmu cu batci .ije re mlatu ce'e ci ninmu cu batci

To make matters even more complicated, there is in CLL even a third use
of termsets (mentioned in <http://jbotcan.org/cllc/c10/s25.html>) that could
in principle appear together with the other two.

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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