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Invent Yourself scripsit:
> I don't seem to be explaining myself clearly. You are talking about the
> conflation of individuals with quantities of substances. That's fine, I
> like it, and I support it, by using le for both of them.
Good.
> What I am really
> saying here though, which nobody is addressing, is that we should reserve
> mass-gadri for collectives. And disambiguate collectives from substances,
> because they are very different things.
I don't agree that they are different, much less very different. I think
this view (which you hold) is just as much a Whorfian mind-lock as the
view (which you don't hold) that an individual != a quantity of a substance.
The "Creatures of Lo[i]" view is that when water (which is a portion of Water)
flows over a dam, this is the same situation as when monkey (which is
a portion of Monkey) falls out of a tree.
The oldest puzzle of Chinese logic has to do with a sentence which, literally
translated, says "white horse not horse". What does this mean? If we
interpret it as a statement about horses, then plainly it is false: every
white horse is a horse. But if we interpret it as a statement about masses
(piro loi), then it is false: the mass "White Horse" is not the same as
the mass "Horse". For good or ill, though, Chinese has only one way of
expressing these two concepts, and so has to struggle with the paradox:
every part of the one mass is part of the other, but the masses are not
the same.
Remember that Chinese, like Mythical-Trobriander, has no count nouns: they
are *all* mass nouns. To say "five persons" one must say "five units-of
Person" (wu3 ge ren2). You don't have to use "ge" (units-of); you can
use a more specific classifier, and some nouns can't take "ge" but require
a different classifier. Similarly, saying "this person" or "that person"
requires a classifier too.
To say "five Person" is not only ungrammatical, it's semantically bizarre
to the Chinese ear.
--
Business before pleasure, if not too bloomering long before.
--Nicholas van Rijn
John Cowan <jcowan@hidden.email>
http://www.ccil.org/~cowan http://www.reutershealth.com