On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 4:36 AM, Squark Rabinovich<top.squ...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Several times I have encountered the claim that lojban sets are rarely used.
Personally, I don't use them at all. > This appears strange to me, for the following reason. Certain gismu , such > as cmima , simxu and probably others expect a set for an arguments. Yes, several gismu definitions do that. I just ignore it because it never adds anything to the meaning, all it does is force an unnecessary level of clumsiness for saying certain things. > For > instance, I was trying to translate into lojban "We teach each other". The > result was > lu'i mi'o simxu le nu ctuca > The lu'i is needed here to transform the mass mi'o into the set needed for > simxu . Without it, the meaning would be something like "each of us is a set > the elements of which teach each other". To get "each of us" it would have to be "ro mi'o", "mi'o" by itself does not force a distributive meaning. But yes, if we take the definition as written, we would be saying that we are a set, which obviously we are not, we are people. I prefer to adapt the definition to "x1 (plural) mutually do x2", and skip sets altogether. > So, why are sets rarely used? Another advantage of ignoring sets is that you can say things like: mi'o simxu lo nu ctuca kei gi'e cilre so'i da We teach one another and learn many things. You couldn't coordinate "simxu" with "cilre" if one required a set and the other required people in the x1. mu'o mi'e xorxes
