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At 11:06 PM 12/19/02 +0000, Jorge Llambias wrote:
la lojbab cusku di'e
> >Yes, but hopefully with the collective meaning = "there are
> >sailors scattered over the deck" and not with the substance
> >meaning "there is sailor goo scattered over the deck".
>
>That is a question of "relevant properties". If the sailor goo scattered
>on the deck has the relevant properties of sailordom for the context, then
>all is fine.
They could hardly have the properties of {blosazri}, how could
goo operate a boat? So at least veridical {loi blosazri} would
not be appropriate in the case of goo.
It depends. If you aren't talking about nu blosazri, then that may not be a relevant property of lei -sailor. If you are, then you are correct that you better not be talking about sailor goo. If you are talking about wetness, then you'd better not be talking about individual molecules of water, because wetness requires a certain density of water to emerge as property. Waves require even greater density, and liquidity; ice crystals don't display that emergent property (nor for that matter, wetness).
>If you boil rice to a pulp and spread rice goo all over the
>floor (or grind it down to rice flour) then you risk the same problem with
>substance-rice that you do with substance-sailor.
Correct. If it ceases to be rice, we shouldn't call it {rismi}
anymore.
But rice pulp and rice flour still are rismi, and could be lei rismi if the properties that you care about still are present.
> >If you divide {pa rismi} in many parts, you normally end up
> >with {so'i rismi} (assuming you started with a big enough
> >{pa rismi}. But if you divide {pa nanmu} in many parts,
> >you don't end up with {so'i nanmu}, no matter how big the
> >pa nanmu was.
>
>This is just arguing about how small you can divide the mass before it
>loses its relevant emergent properties and thereby ceases to be a mass.
I didn't talk of loi/lei in that paragraph. I was talking of
{pa rismi} and divisions of {pa rismi}.
I am not sure that pa nanmu necessarily has to be a single male human. Most languages don't have a way to massive male humans so that "one" could refer to a mass, though we do have the closely related person/people complex in English where a people is made of multiple persons and can be subdivided into smaller "a people". Why do you want to deny the possibility of pa nanmu referring to a maneople, which could composed of many men.
>John (and I) are arguing, I think, that this subdivision of brodas is a SW >restriction that is not necessary. Is the divison of brodas into "animals" and "non-animals" also a SW restriction?
What division is that? There are brodas that we can claim are danlu and some we can claim are na'e danlu, and then there are the bacteria that may or may not be danlu depending on the vintage of your classification system. The closest you can say is that we can divide gismu up into those which are defined using the plant/animal place structure paradigm and those that are not.
It is the same type of subdivision, purely dependent on the meanings of the predicates and no doubt with boundary non-clearcut cases.
But why can't I imagine a world where le sfofa cu danlu?
> >But that's like saying that there is a class of brodas > >such that when you melt lo broda you still have broda and > >other brodas for which you don't. > >If such classes of broda exist, then membership of a particular broda in a >class is something that can/must be asserted, and not necessarily >assumed. Lojban supports Salvador Dali, and his flowing watches. We agree then. We don't want a special gadri for flowing broda, and we don't need a special gadri for substance broda. If we want to talk about flowing watches or watch substance we use selbri, not gadri.
Only if the same is true of water and rice. Any operation that is valid on one selbri is valid on all of them. Whether it makes semantic sense in any plausible context is irrelevant to whether it is valid.
lojbab -- lojbab lojbab@hidden.email Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org