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(resend)So I've spent the last hour fretting that Jordan was right, and collectives really are just {piroloi}. But with his insistence that {jo'u} is true even when the piano lifters work separately, I think I've finally worked out what a collective is.
-- Have you eaten all the rice? -- Yeah, half last night, and half this morning.That's the thing about masses, right? You can still chop them into parts. *Not* individuals; so "one of the band" proves you're not really massifying the band. But into handfuls of goo. "I stepped on some foliage." "How many leaves?" "What should I care? But I didn't step on the lot." Or (and this is an offensive example, but it's offensive precisely because it suppresses individuality, so I think it is instructive), "I met some pussy on the dancefloor" "Oh? how many women did you charm with your debonair manners?" "Man, what do I care? It was just some pussy." But our neanderthal does draw a distinction between "some pussy" and "all the pussy on the dancefloor." He will draw a distinction between being trampled to death by *some* outraged 'pussy', and *all* the outraged 'pussy'. What he is not doing is distinguishing between one and two women.
Now, when the outraged women in the danceclub band together to exterminate our neanderthal, he may very well reason that "all this pussy" is acting as a collective. So is {pi ro loi} the collective? It is, I think --- if you leave time out of it. Leaving time out is a time-honoured (heh) tradition in formal semantics: model-theoretical semantics does it all the time. And of course, it's wrong (which is specifically why Carlson had to invent kinds and stages [avatars] --- to deal with the difference between "John runs" and "John is running".)
What difference does time make? Well, the way Lojban tense is, if tense is unspecified,
mi viska re lo nanmucan mean you see them at different times, since the default tense is not cazi da, but ca'o da: not a point event, but "at some time" within a larger, possibly infinite, duration.
Similarly, you can say mi citka pi ro loi rismiand mean half now and half later. Bzzt, your collective instantly evaporates. you've split the rice in two, you're not eating it all together at the same time.
So what's the collective reading about? pi ro is not enough; I don't want to allow you to say "half of John-and-James lifted the piano today, and the other half tomorrow." "Is it tense?", I says to myself. "An insistence on simultaneity?" After all, if we can say
cazi da mi viska re lo nanmu and mean I see them as a group, then I could also say cazi da pi ro lu'o la djan ce la djiemyz. cu bevri le pipnoand that way guarantee that John and James lift the same piano at the same time.
But just 'cause you see two things together, doesn't mean they're in cahoots together. They've also got to be in the same place. And with the same aim. And...
... hang on. Why am I allowing anyone to hold over the rice till tomorrow anyway? And why make joint action dependent on tense in the first place? The nature of a mass is that you can split it up, in time, or space, or intention, or whatever. The nature of a collective is that you cannot split it up; it is atomic.
So you can sensibly say pimu lei re nanmu cu bevri le pipno ca la cibdei .i je pimu lei re nanmu poi na bevri ca le cibdei cu bevri ca le vondei .i seni'ibo piro le nanmu cu bevri le pipno But if you say pimu lu'oi re nanmu cu bevri le pipno ca la cibdei...then I say Stop. You can't split a collective up like that. They're either all lifting it together, or they're not a collective. And I shouldn't need tense to do it, because tense won't be enough in all cases. Nothing will be.
This means collectives, as indivisible n-tuples, are ontologically distinct from masses, and deserve their own *something*. I won't even insist on a distinct gadri; and I am happy Jordan pointed out {jo'u} is there, because that is indeed {jo'u}'s job. (And as should be clear, I think jo'u cannot be split in time or space, so I claim that indeed, if John then James lift the piano, it is not true that {la djan jo'u la djeimyz. bevri le pipno}. Jordan hesitantly started considering this possibility, I admit.)
But right now, I can't even see a gismu for the notion of 'collective'. And whatever the gadri is, I no longer think it's {pi ro loi}.
**** OK, now let me undermine my position.When I say the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is playing, who do I mean? (We're talking English now.)
Obviously not the second tuba player playing the kazoo. Obviously not a couple of wind players busking in their spare time.
Obviously not just the string players; when that happens, we say "the string section of the MSO", not "the MSO".
In fact we say the MSO is playing for a culture-specific set of criteria, bound up with the history of the orchestra. Basically, if a superset of what would count as an orchestra in 1750 is onstage, with maybe one or two bits missing, you'll call it the orchestra. So you have to have some strings and some winds. The rest is optional.
Lojban can't get into these culture-specific criteria for every single {bende}. So it treats {bende} as a lojbanmass. Strictly speaking, the guy with the kazoo *is* the lojbanmass of the MSO. It takes pragmatics to go from there to "at least a Haydn-size orchestra, plus or minus an instrument." And because this is culture-specific criteria, this has to stay a pragmatic matter.
The other thing lojbanmass gains in pragmatics is the fact that it is a bende --- a group of people that get together for a specific aim. When we say (in English) that the Beatles wrote the song, we mean not only that the lojbanmass of the Beatles did it, but that the lojbanmass is doing something consistent with the aims for with the Beatles were assembled, and with due authority to do so. If that obtains, we say 'the Beatles' for the lojbanmass {pisu'o loi prenrbitlzi} --- even if it's just Lennon/McCartney. If that is not the case, then in English we would insist on all the Beatles being involved -- {piro loi prenrbitlzi}. So if the Beatles write a song, it can be just Lennon/McCartney writing a song. But if I kill the Beatles, it has to be all of them.
... or maybe not. This is murky, and not what we can or should solve now. The point is, that the semantics of a {bende} is complex enough (and that includes Nora's piano foreman}, that a lojbanmass is a good compromise. The nonveridicality thing was another such compromise for definiteness, although I think lamer.
So there's a definite place for lojbanmasses. In fact, a lot of what English would treat as collectives (to the extent it pays attention to the distinction at all) will turn out to be lojbanmasses, and it will be instructive to teach people the difference. But I think {jo'u} and {joi} are distinct for good reason, and we need to be able to reflect that distinction for bunches of stuff. Not even necessarily a gadri (although an extra LAhE will not kill you, for God's Sake). But at least something. In the current regime, there is nothing there to do it. Willing, in fact eager, to be corrected, but I'm not seeing it.
In conclusion: as a linguist, I luuurve Grice. I told my first year students that their pragmatics lecture was the most important lecture they would take with me. And a lot of my formalism is overcompensation for my mundane position, just as xod and I admitted to each other on the wiki once.
But we gotta have our possibility for disambiguation. That's the Lojban way. And right now, I sure would like a clear way of saying "together"...
There may well be an utterly obvious gismu I'm missing; if there is, I'll consider retracting my support of {lu'oi}, in the interests of fundamentalism. Ball's back in whoever's court.
-- How can the king and nobles makes ends meet, Dr Nick Nicholas, if not by eating you and all the others? French & Italian, (Cheetah to Ox; _Tale of the Quadrupeds_, Univ. of Melbourne Byzantium, 14thC) nickn@hidden.email http://www.opoudjis.net --Dr Nick Nicholas, French & Italian, Uni. Melb. nickn@hidden.email
http://www.opoudjis.net "Must I, then, be the only one to be beheaded now?" "Why, did you wanteverybody to be beheaded for your consolation?" Epictetus, Discourses 1.1.