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Jordan DeLong scripsit: > But there's no such thing as a water individual. paunai Are you > trying to tell me that you think x1 of djacu is always a single > molecule? No, that's just one kind of water individual. > You mean that "le djacu" is an individual in the lojban sense. It's > actually a quantity of water (i.e. english-style "mass")---I could > refer to an ocean as "le djacu". You could. A molecule works too, so does a bottleful. > Ugh, that's pretty malglico. I wish they had either both been made > into mass nouns, or neither. But that's the whole point: in Lojban there are no mass nouns or count nouns. When you apply a count gadri (lV) to a selbri, it represents a count noun. When you apply a mass gadri (lVi) to a selbri, it represents a mass noun. > > Historically, "pease" was a mass noun as well, covering the same space as > > "bean", but it came to be construed as a plural count noun "peas", and > > a new singular "pea" was constructed for it. (Semantic differentiation > > came later, and we can still talk of either black-eyed peas or black-eyed > > beans.) You don't comment on this point, but it is precisely the refutation of And's argument (I think) that some nouns are "naturally" mass, some count. Pease changed from a mass noun to a count noun, but nothing about the legume itself changed in any way, just how it was conceptualized by English-speakers. When translating, then "lo dembi" is "one or more beans", but "lo rismi" is "one or more quantities of rice (perhaps rice grains, perhaps not). But when thinking Lojbanically, beans and "rices", or pease and rice, represent a perfect parallelism. -- [W]hen I wrote it I was more than a little John Cowan febrile with foodpoisoning from an antique carrot jcowan@hidden.email that I foolishly ate out of an illjudged faith www.ccil.org/~cowan in the benignancy of vegetables. --And Rosta www.reutershealth.com