[YG Conlang Archives] > [engelang group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
John E Clifford scripsit:
> Gavafuckingai!� The expression "myopic singulars" takes me back (and
> not in a good way) to the olden days of the cross-talking arguments
> about the meaning of {lo} in Loglan, not to mention their continuation
> (and reiteration) in Lojban, the world of Trobriand Islanders
To set the record straight once for all about the Trobrianders:
Their language, Kilivila, is an ordinary classifier language like Chinese,
Japanese, or Bengali. That is, every noun is a mass noun, and to use a
noun with a cardinal number, a demonstrative, or the like, you need to
specify a classifier to specify how to subdivide the mass.
In English, which is not a classifier language, we have two types of
nouns, mass nouns and count nouns. The latter can be enumerated simply:
"one apple", "two apples", etc. But we cannot say "one maize", but must
say "one kernel of maize", "one ear of maize", "one kilo of maize", or
what have you. A sinophone would find the literal Chinese translation
of "one apple" as confusing as we do "one maize"; one needs to say "one
round-thing of apple", "one bowl of apple" (whole or in pieces according
to context), "one kilo of apple", etc. This is of course merely a
grammatical rule, not some kind of special and mysterious world-view
unique to the Trobrianders, or even the Chinese.
As for myopic singularization, in the Xorban context (if I understand
correctly) it is an operator that takes a predicate like "is a bear"
and produces a constant, "the bear-mass, the thing whose parts are
individual bears". This is what JCB called "Mr. Bear." It works like
any other constant in the FOPL context, with no confusions. It could
equally well produce a predicate "is the bear-thing", just as "Socrates"
could be treated as a predicate "is Socrates", and I take no position
on that, since it is easy to see how to translate one to the other.
I hope that is helpful.
--
Using RELAX NG compact syntax to John Cowan <cowan@hidden.email>
develop schemas is one of the simple http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
pleasures in life....
--Jeni Tennison <cowan@hidden.email>