[YG Conlang Archives] > [engelang group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
John Cowan, On 08/09/2012 00:01:
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."
"the bear-mass, the thing whose parts are individual bears" sounds more like "bearage, beardom" than "Mr Bear", while Mr Bear sounds like it is something with two eyes, one mouth, etc., and a myopic singular can be that -- it's myopic because you see a bear and then another bear and another, and suppose they are all the same bear. It might be clearer if we used the gloss "ursine" rather than "bear", with la crba being "that which is ursine", which is consistent with both a "bearage/beardom" and a "Mr Bear/the generic bear" construal. We must bear in mind also that the myopic singularization is a conventional implicature, i.e. presupposition, so not part of what is claimed to be true. To turn it into ordinary logic, replace it with s-. --And.