[YG Conlang Archives] > [jboske group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
One, Jorge says {loi} must be collective, because it has an inner quantifier, and inner quantifiers are only compatible with individuals, and if a Lojban string is grammatical it must be meaningful. To the last, I say bullshit. That's a bogus assumption, particularly since any fundamentalist solution to these problems will use existing grammar. Let some strings be meaningless. Otherwise, we have to drop the whole grammar; and this is not going to happen. And honestly, if you were going to drop the whole grammar, why didn't you introduce mid-sentence prenexes instead of your intensional article anyway?
Two: Aside to the founders persisting in conflating substance and collective. If one man carries a piano, {loi nanmu cu bevri lo pipno}. If two do separately, {loi nanmu cu bevri lo pipno}. If two do so together, {loi nanmu cu bevri lo pipno}. A pox on you if you refuse to grant us a way of distinguishing the last two cases. A pox on you if you say "leave it to pragmatics"; then Lojban is no better than English (and the logic of this is straightforward, there is no need to leave it to pragmatics.) A pox on you if you think Lojban should make distinctions made in Timbuktu, but not even allow distinctions made in English. Even if you enforce loi as a conflation (which looks impossible to me right now, given the very different ontologies), we will have our Collective LAhE.
Three, I think I finally got an instance where And's Unique works. A pox on everyone here for not coming up earlier with examples that show how it works *in English* (and to hell with the Trobrianders; if we here now don't get it, how will we ever teach it, and how will anyone else ever get it?) (And did come up with some decent examples later on, but hasn't insisted on them. He should learn to: the Unique will never be sold on the basis of "All lions are one lion".)
That example is what started this whole sorry mess: I like chocolate.Individuate chocolate howsoever you choose. Pieces, packets, whatever. What does it mean when you say {mi nelci LVV cakla}?
The Prototype of chocolate defines chocolate ahead of time as something you like. Bzzt.
The Mode of chocolate is probably just as unworkable, and you really don't want to get into counting types of choc in the world.
{rau lo cakla} isn't generic enough.
The Collective of chocolate means you can't like one in isolation, you
have to like them all together. Which is bogus.
The Substance of Chocolate is very close, but even here, we get into implicit quantities. Not inner, because we admit substance has no individuals to quantify, by definition. But outer: should you be able to say you like half the substance? And what would that mean?
If we insist on Substance not Collective for {loi} (which I still think is the fundamentalist thing to do), we might work around that. But if we try Unique here instead, I think we're OK.
When you like Nick, you don't just like a bunch of avatars of Nick, or even most of them. You see an underlying individual behind all the avatars, and you like that.
When you like chocolate, you don't just like the individual pieces you eat. You like the individual behind all the pieces. That individual is pretty close to the prototype, but the prototype is a definition; the Kind, you can still find out about.
And And's Unique is a Kind. As in, chocolate is a kind of thing I like; or, I like that kind of chocolate: this takes the individuals belonging to the kind, and treats them as a single, indivisible thing. But it admits that the Kind has avatars, of individual pieces; whereas masses don't admit that.
And now I'm getting confused again, because that still sounds like masses (one piece chocolate?), so I'll leave it for someone else to run with.
### ki egeire arga ta sthqia ta qlimmena;#Nick Nicholas, French/Italian san ahdoni pou se nuxtia anoijiata # University of Melbourne thn wra pou kelahda epnixth, wimena! # nickn@hidden.email stis murwdies kai st' anqismena bata.# http://www.opoudjis.net-- N. Kazantzakhs, Tertsines: Xristos#