towards a complete gadri picture

As always, please add any comments below the bottom line.

This is a quickly moving target, as I do my best to bridge the profound analyses of jboske for people, like me, who chiefly want something good to use.

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Gadri

le, lo I tentatively accept the Excellent Solution. examples of XS lo here are some concrete examples of its treatment of lo.

lei, loi loi has historically been conflated between substance and collective. Unless people agree to use loi only for collective, then it must be difracted:

• loi'a collective
• loi'e substance

le'e, lo'e lo'e can remain according to most common usage not influenced by Jorge: as meaning "typical", which means precisely, a generalization of the [[tatistical mode].

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Definitions

Collective] a multiplicity with emergent properties unseen by the individuals (3 men can carry the piano, no one of them can.)

Plurality a bunch of individuals taken as group which only has properties that the individuals have (with the obvious trivial exceptions).

Substance beer, ice, and stuff where there are no obvious boundaries between individual pieces. The most reasonable quantification is to treat all the existing substance in the universe as a single glob, and consider small chunks of it. We can consider anything physical as a subtance; humans can be thought of as chunks of "human goo".

Mister, Unique, Kind Mr. Bird is a hypothetical entity such that every real bird is actually a sighting of Mr. Bird. The Lion is my favourite animal, The Cheetah is the animal that runs fastest, Blue is my favourite colour, Monday is the first day of the week, B is the second letter of the alphabet, I like sherry.

Intension and Extension These are notoriously ill-expressed concepts, but I've found a dyad of ideas which approximate them, even if the correlation is not perfect. Intension is similar to selkaicfa; beginning with a set of qualities, one discusses the items, if any, that qualify. Extension is similar to kaicfa; beginning with an object in mind, one discusses its qualities in order to describe it.

Any When I use "any" in English, I am experiencing selkaicfa; I have a requirement in mind, and I am referring to whatever items fir the bill. However, I also can use "any" to express a lack of preference among the members of a set, all of whose members might be known specifically to me: "Hit this button with any of your fingers."

Nonspecific

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Facts

Any = Nonspecific

• [[jboske 2870]

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Questions] to ponder

(no discussion here, please.)

1. Any vs. Nonspecific

1. Plurality vs. Collective; are both needed?

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Discussion

• (About Intension) This is pretty good and justifies the reading of {sisku}. It would require rewriting the rest and would still leave us without object words where they seem to be required (the usual complaint about {sisku}).pc
  • But it does not deal with "intensional contexts" which is another problem (once thought to be solved by using intensions). Contexts in which sentence-wide particular generalization does not apply and where identicals cannot be exchanged. We are now in the process of creating -- better, recognizing -- a number of descriptions which are intensional in one or both of these ways. pc

• (About Any) That is, just an ordinary "some" quantifier.pc
  • Again with my Lakota in mind: "waskuyeca *eya* bluha." (I've *some* candies.) - "waskuyeca *etan* luha hwo?" (Do you have some/any candies?) "waskuyeca *etan* icu wo!" (Take some/any candies!) --.aulun.

• • • Is this *eya* /*etan* distinction parallel to the one you talk about elsewhere, realis/irrealis approximately? Questions and commands are intensional contexts, because quantification and exchange of identicals don't work in them, irrealis because the answer may be "no" and the command about a nonexistent.
    • That seems to be how D. Rood et al. see - and explain - it. Same contrast with _wan/wanji_ (a, one), a rule that sometime's less obvious due to other grammatical features, e.g. "hoksila wan bluha" (I have a/one boy) - "Hoksila wanji luha hwo?" (Do you have one boy?), - but (answering to a question like: "He otuwanhe kin el owotetipi wanji han hwo?" - Is there a restaurant in this town?) _wanji_ nevertheless is used also in a statement (realis): "Ka wigli'o'inajin kin hel isakib *wanji* he" (Over there, next to the gas station there is *one*)! This might be due to the fact that 'articles' (topic markers) are not allowed to stand without a noun, and _wanji_ is a numeral (whereas _wan_ first of all seems to be a topic marker, albeit with a numeric function). --.aulun.

One of the joys of SS {loi} and (I think and eagerly await confirmation) XS {lo} is that it takes in every possible thing of the kind given and thus surely the "right" ones. But, of course, you can't quantify over it, because quantification requires existents, and you can't exchange identicals, because sets with identical existents will have different possibles.

• SS no longer holds that Mr. is {loi}
• In the relative clarity that has finally emerged here over the last couple of weeks, we see that Mr. Broda is descried only through his avatar. This makes "The Lion is my favorite animal" not obviously a good candidate for {lo cinfo}. Even if there is an idealized lion that you prefer to even the idealized forms of every other animal, it might well turn out that all the actual lions (some of which are certainly rather scuzzy) were things to which you preferred even a splendid aardvaark. I am not sure that in that case we could still say that you favored lions.

• • Wrong. I like chocolate does NOT mean I like every piece of chocolate; likewise for lions. Mister is not ro. And this wiki is not the place for threaded discussions on trivial points like this. --xod
    • So far as I can recall, no one has said that it did. My last comment was that it meant I like enough (actual or possible) pieces. The problem is that it also does not mean that I like some single piece, however randomly selected.

As for this being the place to discuss this issue (which hardly seems trivial), notice how much more clarity has been achieved in two weeks here than in six months on jboske. I suspect this locale just weeds out crap. pc

• • Our brief agreement with pc did seem too good to be true. :) With {lo cinfo} as a constant kind, it is perfectly reasonable to use it for "my favourite animal". Even though you don't like the analogy, it is like saying "John is my favourite person" without reference to particular stages of John. "The lion is my favourite animal, I always look for it when I visit any zoo." --xorxes
    • Bu {lo cinfo}, while it may refer in some sense to a kind, actually refers in any sentence to an avatar. And to say that one likes lions is then to say (as xorxes does immediately below) that one generally likes those avatars. But {lo cinfo} does not (yet) have a "generally" built in. It does, however, have a built-in (often implicit) modal/tense/abstraction superordinate on each occurrence. Are we to take it that this defaults to "generally" when not explicit or predictable from context? This seems perfectly reasonable, but should be said, if it is intended. pc

• • • • Out of context, I would tend to take any claim as a general claim, yes. I would take {la djan melbi} out of context to be a general apprisal of John rather than a particular one, "John is handsome" rather than "John looks handsome (today)". But context can easily override that. I rather not talk of "default" values, because I take those to be the obligatory reading in the absence of an explicit value, and we probably don't want that to be the case. --xorxes
        • How about "prima facie mode" or some such. To be overridden by explicit modals (etc.) or the norms for particular brivla (the ever-popular {nitcu}, {sisku} and the like)-- where the override would be explicit in the dictionary -- or some general sense of situation (glorking-- but I don't like that). Real concrete cases would, of course, use {su'o} or whatever instead of unquantified {lo}. Aside from the glorking, which needs to be reduced as much as possible, this looks workable and clear. pc

• • • • • • Except that I went looking for any operator like "generally" -- and others of that ilk -- and found that they don't exist. We have only subjective ones, so far as I can tell -- and this appears to be true for the related gadri ("the typical," e.g.) as well. Sigh!
            • Would {ta'e} or {na'o} work for this? --xorxes

• • • • • • • • The likely place to start, but both are given as subjective or at least intentional and "generally" and the like purport to be objective. Of course, that is probaby sham, but for logic it is a useful way to go.

• • You could also think of it this way: "In situations where I had to choose between an avatar of Mr Lion and avatars of other animals, I would tend to choose(/like more/whatever favourite implies) the lion." "I favour the lion over other animals." --xorxes
    • See above pc

• (On Collective): I think it could be reasonable to consider collective gadri (loi) as referring to the collective which evinces emergent properties not shown by the members; however, that must be a guideline, not a rule. When you say {lei prenu cu bevri le pipno}, you are not necessarily saying that the individuals did not. That is, saying {loi broda cu brode} does not imply that {lo broda na brode}. Otherwise you're asking for trouble, making a whole lot of negative claims when you don't mean to. --.mark.
  • OK. Claims for a collective don't entail that the claim is false for any member of the collective; but claims for a member also do not entail the corresponding claim for the collective. If a member actually does alone what is attributed to the collective, there needs to be some sense that the member is acting for the collective, an intentional connection to the others (or to the collective as a governing concept). pc