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RE: [jboske] individuation and masses (was: RE: mass, group,




la and cusku di'e

> There is no disagreement about how to do distributive
> countables, is there? Doesn't everybody agree that {re djacu}
> is "two waters" and that it refers to two quantities of water
> with contextual boundaries? (two glasses of water, two lakes,
> whatever. My impression is that there is unanimity about this
> part

Not everybody seems to accept that the boundaries must be
intrinsic. Some people seem to think that the individuals can
be arbitrarily delimited.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by intrinsic here.
They are arbitrary in the sense that they are purely contextual.
If there are three tables with two bottles of water in each
table, one person may see six quantities of water and another
person may see three quantities, and another person a single
quantity, depending on what one wants to talk about.

> I can't see fractions of Substance making much sense. I think
> I see Substance just as Unique

"Not all metal is solid"

{me'i jinme cu sligu} for the kind of general statement that
only appears in Logic books, and {lo'e jinme me'iroi sligu}
for the more relaxed everyday sense.

> >"I stepped in (some) water. It was muddy. Then I washed my
> >feet with (some) water. It was clean." I see these as
> >+specific -intrinsically-bounded. If lVi were the Substance-
> >gadri, I'd use lei for these
>
> I'd use Unique there. Or just {le djacu} if +specific is
> required

Unique won't do for me, because we're dealing with two different
amounts of water; at the very least they are distinct pagbu
be lo-Unique djacu.

They are two avatars of water. Water being muddy and water being
clean, just like my feet.

{le djacu} won't do either, because the
water is not intrinsically bounded.

If there was no other quantity around, then being the only one
seems like a sufficient boundary. If there were other puddles,
then it was bounded.

Note that I can't even paraphrase with pagbu, because if I say
"le pagbu", I am saying that the pagbu is intrinsically delimited.
So I need "le-Substance pagbu be lo-Unique djacu", or
"le-Substance fraction be lo-Unique djacu".

I probably don't understand the "intrinsic" part.

(How do we express
fractions like "almost all of"?)

{piji'iro}?

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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