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At 04:24 PM 12/21/02 +0000, And Rosta wrote:
Lojbab:
> 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
How would you say "Some men jointly carried a piano"?
THAT one I would use loi, because the number is unspecified. If it is two particular men, then it is lei re. If it is two men, but not any particular two men, I would use lo nanmu remei.
Anyway, even if you wouldn't use "loi" for any of them, you *could*, given the current prescription.
loi would include all of them, but would not distinguish them.
> 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
{lei} means a SPECIFIC group of men. If you use {lei} to refer to
a nonspecific group of men then you're not using Lojban correctly.
I would argue that if you know it was two, then it probably is specific, but see the lo remei solution above.
> >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 That could work. But it's a bit vague: if I draw a picture of rabbitkind, does it have just two ears? Is the collective of all rabbits rabbitkind? We can see 'mankind has built great cities', where we seem to think of mankind as a collective. Is chocolatekind an agglomeration of chocolate, or does it have to do with individual countable chocolates? Given the vagueness, it seems that Kind would have been quite a good label for lojbanmass... That is, the range of meanings covered by '-kind' seem to pretty much match the range covered by lojbanmasses.
OK.BTW, Nora doesn't want to get involved (she is reading about one message in 20) but posited two ideas to throw into the hoop:
The examples you've been using have either been uniform substances or countable nouns in English. Nora points out that Lojban selbri also have adjectival and verbal characteristics. She asks whether all your various analyses of djacu hold up when translating it as "watery (thing)", and how you handle blanu which is normally an adjective in English. I think that she suspects that we are as usual getting hung up in English rather than Lojban semantics.
Nora also opines that the inner quantifier of loi is NOT necessarily the same as the inner quantifier of lo'i, disagreeing with me (and she convinces me). The supervisor who does not physically carry the piano could be part of loi/lei pipnybevri, but they would NOT be lo pipnybevri, and hence not members of lo'i pipnybevri.
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