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At 12:25 PM 12/20/02 +0000, Jorge Llambias wrote:
la lojbab cusku di'e
>It depends. If you aren't talking about nu blosazri, then that may not be
>a relevant property of lei -sailor.
No, I'm talking of {loi blosazri}.
But the referent of that (being quantified pisu'o) is contextually determined. If the context is the activity of operating a boat, then any sailor goo is not relevant except to the extent that it causes boat operators to slip on deck or to get nauseous. i.e. sailor goo is not piso'u loi blosazri ku poi sazri le bloti
>If you are, then you are correct that
>you better not be talking about sailor goo.
The sentence in question was something like:
loi blosazri cu ve'a cpana le barloi
"There's sailor all over the deck."
My understanding is that that can't refer to sailor goo,
because sailor goo doesn't operate boats and so {blosazri}
probably doesn't cover it.
Sailor goo may not operate boats, but there is no claim in the above that it is operating boats, only that it is cpana le barloi. There is no claim implicit in loi blosazri that it caca'a sazri lo bloti, only that it pujacajaba ka'e sazri lo bloti (and perhaps not even then, since there may be fairweather "sailors" who know only how to passive ride the boat - I've hear that historically, the British admiralty fit this description, and it would be an argument whether a British admiral sazri lo bloti if he only ordered and never acted to operate the boat, but he WOULD be part of loi blosazri, the team/mass that operates the boat, and might be so even after a cannonball spread admiral goo on the deck, if he was still intact enough to give orders. He is part of the mass, and he recognizes his body parts on the deck as (a less-than-functional but still intrinsically inalienable) part of him, so they are also part of the mass, but no more involved in operating the boat than his appendix which still might be attached to his body. So why is the sailor goo less a part of loi blosazri than the admiral's appendix.
(actually, even with intact sailors, it is probably only the soles of their feet that are cpana le barloi, and that is true only if they are barefoot).
> > >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.
Ok, if they are still rice then they are rismi. No problem.
But "they" aren't still rice, but "it" is still rice - is has lost its clear divisibility.
>I am not sure that pa nanmu necessarily has to be a single male
>human.
How about {pa naurka'u}?
I don't know any claim that can be made of pa naurka'u. If you take your typical naurka'u and remove his appendix, is he still lo naurka'u? How about if you shave his head, start chopping off his fingers, etc. In order to be naurka'u, you would not be able to remove anything and still call it naurka'u, and we don't have that clear an idea of the essence of nanmu
Or are you saying that any {pa broda}
must be divisible into {so'i broda}?
No. Only that lei pa broda may be divisible into parts, not all of which are necessary to still say that pida'a lei pa broda cu borda
>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.
I don't want to deny the possibility, but if that is the range
allowed by {nanmu} then the gi'uste is not clear about it.
The gi'uste was not written with even the slightest interest in semantic rigor, since I still don't have much interest in it today. I never expected nor intended the gi'uste wording to be treated as if it were a clear statement of meaning, and I'm not sure it is possible in any language to give a unarguably clear statement of meaning.
The NORMAL use of nanmu, at least for English speakers, will probably be for pa nanmu to be more or less equivalent to "one man", but I don't want to exclude the possibility of it referring to "one maneople".
It is not the nature of gismu semantics that it clearly distinguishes between singulars, plurals, and masses, and all the other flavors you guys have concocted this month - that has to be done with gadri, or possibly with predications. naurka'u is not necessarily any better than nanmu, since we don't have a clear definition of what constitutes the smallest indivisible unit of naurka'u such that it still remains naurka'u.
> >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. Correct. The same thing happens with broda that are "substances".
Any broda can be considered a substance. Some are not usefully considered a substance, but all MAY be.
> >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. If what is true? There is no gadri for animals, but some broda describe animals. There is no gadri for divisible substances, but some broda describe divisible substances.
Those are claims about broda; they are not necessarily intrinsic to a particular broda. (I think we should have been using more of the brodV here, since this seems very confusing).
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