Re: some of... vs. some... et al.

Roger wrote:

<<
One spoke French // One
of them spoke French.  Any difference?
 >>

I'd say a difference of register.  "One of them" sounds more
colloquial to me; "one" sounds more literary.  Or, if not, it
seems to cause the hearer to expect a list (e.g., "One spoke
French, one spoke German, and the rest spoke something
resembling Linear A").  You can have a list with "one of
them", but I'm more comfortable with the comment ending with
"one of them spoke French" than with "one spoke French".
Can't say why.

Roger continues:

<<
I can see how to handle that, but as for the other usages, am I perhaps
worrying about nothing more than an English translation problem???
 >>

This is something to think about.  A lot of the semantics literature
is hung up on quantifier scope, the canonical example being
"Every boy loves every girl" (or is it "some boy loves every
girl...?").  The question is whether, in the first example, there's
a unique boy that loves a unique girl, and this works out for
all boys and girls, or if you find any particular boy, he will
love every girl on the planet, and this is true of all boys.

Keeping that in mind, let me offer a real world example.  A
friend of mine here at UCSD is a semanticist.  In our field
methods class, we're studying an African language, Moro,
about which nothing has been written (and boy do I have
stories!  The language makes no case distinction between
nominative and accusative, but does have *two* inessives,
a supressive, a locative, a genitive and an instrumental/
commitative.  *However*, it does have an accusative case
for proper names!), and each of us picks a topic to elicit.
My semanticist friend decided to do quantifier scope.

First, he was surprised to find out that the quantifier /ej/
could mean "every", "each" and "any".  While trying to
elicit "No boy loves any girl", he was frustrated at discovering
that the corresponding Moro sentence meant:

(a) No boy loves any girl.
(b) No boy loves every girl.
(c) No boy loves each girl.
(d) No boy loves a girl.
(e) The boy doesn't love any girl.
(f) The boy doesn't love every girl.
(g) The boy doesn't love each girl.
(h) The boy doesn't love a girl.
(i) The boy doesn't love girls (in general).

Then when he tried to get "Every boy loves no girl", he
got the exact same sentence back.

The point is that context-independent language is rare outside
of linguistics, and many languages just don't need to be specific,
and don't care about specifity--and, indeed, *can't* be specific
about certain things.  Certainly, in Moro you could translate,
"Some boys love one girl only.  Some boys love more than one
girl (two or more).  But [insert above sentence]" to get an exact
meaning, but usually it's just not important.

So, for your "All people are fools" example, both "All people (in
general) are fools" and "All the people (in this room) are fools"
would be translated the same way (no definite articles), but they
would have different, specific meanings depending on context.

-David