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John: > And Rosta scripsit: > > > Our Forefathers spoke of Mr Bird as a mass, but there is loads of > > confusion here. Lojbo 'masses' are groups = logli 'sets'. The > > notion of 'group' makes more sense for things that are naturally > > individuable. For stuff that isn't naturally individuable, > > the notion of 'mass' is more appropriate, but is not really distinct > > from Mr Stuff. > > What counts as "natural" individuability? > > The-mass-of-all-ice weighs billions of tons, but Mr. Ice does not, because > the (proto)typical instance of ice is much smaller. The Greenland and > Antarctica ice sheets are not (proto)typical. Yet boundaries between > ice blobs are rather arbitrary I won't say what counts as "natural" individuability, because for the present discussion I think it is sufficient to say that it is that criterion that allows one to predict whether a noun in English is normally used as a mass noun or normally used as a count noun. Essentially, the issue is whether the category's properties include criteria for recognizing an instance's boundary and hence recognizing distinct instances. > Jordan DeLong scripsit: > > > [1] In cases where individuals don't really make sense for a > > particular thing, such as water/sand/etc, the brivla are defined > > so that individual references actually reference masses already (le > > djacu is a mass, and lei djacu is a mass of masses), which keeps > > individuals more fundamental > > Au contraire: le djacu is a *quantity*, an *individual*, of water, in the > same sense that we say "Give me two waters" for glasses, or bottles, or > jugs, or test tubes full of water. The whole point is that Lojban doesn't > make brivla-specific distinctions between "mass nouns" and "count nouns"; > everything is a count noun with lV and a mass noun with lVi. There are > exceptions, like le gunma, where the individual is itself a mass Previously I've dismissed this as bogus. Just because there are by some criterion two amounts of water, one can't necessarily describe them as "two waters". But I just had an epiphany (which in lojbanistan often means "I have just realized something that other people have probably known all along"!). Maybe "lo djacu" is appropriate in exactly those cases where English can use "a water", and not just wherever English can use "an amount of water". That is really cool, and it also makes me value massifier gadri much more, because of course normally we want to say "water", not "a water", so if "lo djacu" can only mean "a water", then to say "water" we will need lu'olo'i or lu'olau'a. --And.