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Great stuff, Nick, and 99% sound. Herewith a few nits:
> A mass simply says that you cannot
> make the bridi claim of individuals in the group, but only in the whole
> group. {loi nanmu cu bevri le pipno}: not Andrew, Barry and Chris each
> carried the piano, but the three of them in concert carried the piano.
This needs tightening: it might be the case that each of them did so.
Loi kanba is hairy, and indeed ro kanba are hairy too.
> Now, count all the Americans there are. Bob
> and John and Robin and xod and Jay and Mark and and and.
I first read "and and and" as "and And and" and was about to object that
And's no American (he is, of course, sralo selmamta).
> So where does this lo'e merko d00d live? How many kids has she got? Did
> he cheat on his taxes last year? Do you think she'll go out with me?
>
> Now, these questions are nonsense, right?
I don't think so. The first one may be na'i, and the second one is
probably about the (statistically) average American rather than the
typical one. But the third and the fourth have answers. I don't know
the answer to the third (or even if the answer is known). But
I think it's clearly just false, not meaningless, to claim that the typical
American will go out with you Friday week. The overwhelming majority of
them will not: indeed, those that will are a small and highly atypical
subset.
> Just as it's meaningful to say
> whether the typical American likes baseball, but not whether the
> typical American will go out with you Friday week.
Apart from the fact that American's don't say "Friday week", and don't
even agree on what to say (some make it "next Friday", others "the Friday
after next", assuming it is early in the week):
> (If I can't become a lecturer, I'll try
> the next best thing...)
Man subjects us all to a (highly witty and entertaining, actually) lecture,
and says he can't become a lecturer. He is a lecturer. He reminds me of
the people who upload megabytes of fiction to the Web for all to read and
then whine that they can't get published.
> And what do I think now that I realise the error of my ways, and then
> see the language designer say he doesn't know what {lo'edu'u} means,
> and won't be told by a jboskeist what it means? I say he needs to learn
> Lojban. ;-)
"When Ibsen claims that certain passages in 'Peer Gynt' are not allegorical,
and that 'Emperor and Galilean' is his best play, then all we can say is
that Ibsen is an indifferent critic of Ibsen."
--Northrop Frye, _Anatomy of Criticism_
As a final note, I think that while "mi nelci lo'enu mi limna" is clearly
better for "I like swimming", "mi nelci lenu mi limna" is just salvageable
because of the specific (as opposed to definite) nature of "le". It
means "I enjoy certain events of (I swim)", and that is not the *same*
claim as the lo'enu version -- you might have in mind only highly
particularized swims, but it need not be so.
After all, when looking at a field "mi viska le bakni" does not mean that
you are seeing only particular beeves: "le bakni" in this case means
"all those cattle there". The truth conditions of "lei bakni" would of
course be almost the same, but "le" is not *wrong*.
--
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wise wives welcome the spring jcowan@hidden.email
by moving the Unix. http://www.reutershealth.com
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