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At 03:28 PM 12/21/02 +1100, Nick Nicholas wrote:
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.
1. I would not use "loi" for any of these.2. For one activity of carrying a piano, whether two do it in tandem or whether they do it in alternation, both would use lei, which does not distinguish between the two; lei presumes that the guy not physically bearing weight at the moment is still participating in the one action.
A pox on you if you think Lojban should make distinctions made in Timbuktu, but not even allow distinctions made in English.
pa lo nanmure lo nanmu or le rei nanmu (the English is ambiguous how many events of carrying take place)
lei re nanmu seem to make the distinctions.(if the argument is that we have to make distinctions made in all languages including English, then we also need to add a +animacy gadri, and probably a few others.)
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.
I'm not sure I object (I'm not sure I understand, either, but that is the norm for me these days %^)
{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?
Half of all the chocolate of the world is of a sort that I like (the other half is of a sort that I don't like).
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.
We like the particular avatar of Nick that we have interacted with, presuming that the avatar is enough a representation of the real Nick (the composite of all possible avatars) and that the latter has no secret vices (other than conlanging) that would lead us to not like him.
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.
I like that word better. I like Mr. Rabbit = I like rabbitkind. I like chocolate = I like chocolatekind. I like Nick - I like Nickkind.
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.
I think that masses do, but the nature of the avatar depends on the context. The avatar of the the two men carrying the piano may have both supporting the piano, or it may have one man carrying and one man clearing the path of obstacles.
-- 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