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Nick:
> So the lack of a -distributed gadri gets in the way of Lojban design
> goals. In fact, that there are *no* Lojban means of disambuguating a
> reading as being collective. {gunma}? Lojbanmass, not collective.
> {mei}? Ditto. {jo'u}? If Jordan has his way, ditto. Yeah, pragmatics
> tells you that {lei nanmu} is collective not distributive. But there
> is *no* disambiguation in Lojban whatever right now, using explicit
> words rather than pragmatics. None. Including {nanmu remei}, which is
> still a lojbanmass. And {jo'u} isn't enough -- not if you're talking
> about a million man march, as distinct from a million people going to
> DC at some stage in the year (lo), or the NAACP leadership, on behalf
> of its million man membership, going to DC (piano carrier
> supervisors)
I accept that we need a -distributed, for the reasons you say, but
I am not sure that the NAACP leadership case is incompatible with
the collective going to DC. I think it's pragmatically determined
whether the leadership going counts as the collective going. But
the way to disambiguate would be to use piro-Collective and
pisu'o-Collective. Either way, it is -distributed. And it is
distinct from Substance because we can count million-man collectives.
BTW, ignore the following if it confuses things too much at this
stage, but I think a collective of indefinite cardinality can be
uncountable, and thereby would qualify as Substance. So it is
possible for a Collective to be a Substance. If {mei} meant
Collective, then under the Excellent Solution, {lo (tu'o) za'umei}
would be an uncountable Collective-Substance and {pa lo za'umei}
would be a countable Collective. {lo remei} would be weird and
would mean something like the English "There was pair all over
the road". {pa lo remei} would mean "a pair". In other words,
za'umei is like plise in being equally normal with a countable
or uncountable (non-Substance or Substance) interpretation,
while remei is like nanmu in being more normal with a countable
interpretation. Sticking with ExSol, where loi/lei are Collective,
I would say that they are unmarked for +/-Substance -- that is,
{loi za'u broda} may be either {lo broda za'umei} or {pa lo
broda za'umei}/{lo su'o broda za'umei}. I don't see this as a
problem.
For obvious reasons, I can't reformulate the above using CLL
Lojban!
--And.