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.