This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.
Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.
To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.
I don't quite get the difference between "any" and "every" (in the more interesting cases.) Does "every 2 out of 30 [things have this property]" mean the set of ordered twos as a whole thing (unlike "any 2 two out of 30", which is talking about any one combination of two things but not all possible combinations taken at once?
And if "every" needs some kind of order, even if we don't know which, and some kind of "presented-togetherness", then we can, for example, say, "[every two out of four] out of [every thirty out of thirty]", but I don't quite understand what it would say...
I mean, it doesn't have to be something trivial like "every apple out of thirty apples has a spot on its side", it can be something like "every node out of thirty is connected to another node". But even this second case does not quite fit. Are there even objects for which "every 2 out of 30" and "every 1 out of 30" are two distinct things?
(and negation is even worse.)
"Every" doesn't need an order.
"For every x, property(x) holds" means "it is not the case that for any x, property(x) does not hold."
"For any x, property(x) holds" means "it is not the case that for every x, property(x) does not hold."
In Russian, quantifier adjectives are often implicit, which could be a part of the problem here. Native Russian speakers (like me) often have problems with this, also with definite vs indefinite articles in English.
edit: not only implicit but ambiguous when explicit, too!
Per... (read more)