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Nick Nicholas scripsit:
> ? You're not referring to Bob Hawke, erstwhile PM of Australia, are you?
Exactly. Since I know no other Australian politicians by name, Unique-
InMind-AustralianPolitician is naturally named "Bob".
> D00d (I've just been watching _Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey_), that... is
> the Unique! Now this is a pretty turn of events. The Unique is
> restoring Mr Shark to Lojban.
>
> Btw, I have this right, yes?
Well, there is a Unique/Substance conflation here, which is a *different*
conflation from any we've seen so far.
> lo karni is a physical object
>
> lo karni peme'e la niu.iork.taims. is the physical thing you pay 25c
> for out of those vending machine thingies
75 cents in these latter days, I fear.
> Last Monday's New York Times is a Unique of all those physical things
> --- they are all physical avatars of the underlying one issue.
>
> The New York Times in general is a Unique of the Unique (which is just
> a different Unique).
>
> The Unique has individual properties. Therefore the Unique of the NYT
> has 100-odd pages, not a zillion.
Exactly. The Jbomass, though, does have a zillion pages, at least if
"page" means a physical object, one side of a sheet. In a different
sense of "page" it has only 100-odd.
> > xa: each individual
> > xu: the set of every individual
>
> lo
No, this is ro lo (Loglan lea) and lo'i.
> > xi: each individual, except (an/a few) atypical one(s)
> > xr: the set containing every individual, except (an/a few) atypical
> > one(s)
>
> Either Mode or Unique
I think the official definition is Mode, but I bet in practice it looks
more like Unique.
> Btw, I think this helps see what we can claim of the Unique, a
> legitimate concern Jordan raises. When Carlson defined his Kind, he
> first distinguished between indefinite plurals in English that are true
> of all their referents (Dogs breathe) and those true of most of them
> (dogs make good pets). The former is an individual plural: {ro lo gerku
> cu vasxu}. The latter is a generic statement: The Dog is a kind of
> animal that makes a good pet; sure there are exceptions, but in
> general...
>
> So right now, to keep my own sanity, I paraphrase as follows:
>
> Prototype(x) = x, by definition
No, I can't swallow that. The prototypical triangle is equilateral or
at least isosceles, but these are not part of the definition of a triangle.
(Likewise, the prototypical bird can fly, etc.)
> Now, you'd expect people to be saying stuff of the Kind when they've
> actually got a reasonable sample of the population: the Kind should be
> based on the Mode.
Well, but what about dispositions? "Lumps of salt dissolve in water"
is true even though most lumps of salt never do get dissolved in water.
> Taking avatars and individuals as the model for individuals and kinds
> again: in most messages, Nick is fundie. In a thread or two, Nick is
> revisionist. Say each message represents a different avatar of Nick.
> Some avatars are fundie, some revisionist. If almost all avatars are
> fundie, you say Nick (the unique extracted from the avatars) is fundie
> (in general). If a non-negligible number of exceptions become salient,
> you change that to Nick is sometimes fundie and sometimes revisionist.
> That is subjective, true, but not completely arbitrary. Mode Nick
> doesn't help here, because most of the time Nick is neither fundie nor
> revisionist, he's asleep, transcribing wordlists, or proofreading his
> book.
+1
> > xo: one or more individuals, it matters not which
> > xw: the set containing one or more individuals, it matters not which
>
> ... Intensional?
>
> You mean, Carter got this right years two decades before we did? Aaargh!
Well, the example he gives is "Hand me nails". Here he wants one or more
nails, but it doesn't matter which nails. Ditto, of course, for "Hand me
a screwdriver."
> (But did he allow quantification? So can you still distinguish between
> transparent and opaque with xa vs. xo?)
Gua\spi quantifies with full predicates, but xa means "rolo" as I noted above.
> Still don't get it. You are allowing that remna can be considered as
> uncountable (cf. pussy), and djacu as countable (portions). I presume
> you're saying that underlyingly, water is still a substance, whether
> you count portions or not, and people are still individuals up until
> the time you put them through the grinder, whether you ignore the
> distinctions between them or not? But that's a nicety and essentialism,
> surely.
+1
> ... Remind me why {mi djica loi mikce} was rejected as a general
> solution? Because whatever it was sinks this too, I think...
Because you are not willing to settle for sundry unattached doctor parts.
IOW, some Doctor-Substance will not do.
> Sorr, got pi'u and jo'u confused. I still suspect jo'u was introduced
> in a maths-induced bender, without realising it reintroduced the tuple
> as distinct from the mass; but that's a historical matter.
The 10/88 selma'o list says:
# jo'u JOI jorne '... in common with ...'; indicates a common
# relationship which the two share. This is the default interpretation of
# a duplicated sumti position (where tags are used to force two different
# sumti expressions to be, for example, the first sumti of a bridi.
Casting call story: +1
> So a duo singing is a lojbanmass. But singing is not an emergent
> property, since you can say the individuals sing.
Sing zo'e, yes; sing a duet, no. No one person, unless he is from Tanno
Tuva, can sing a duet.
> Carrying a piano is duo which is a lojbanmass, because you can factor
> in or out the supervisor and the blind dude's guide. Carrying is an
> emergent property (because no one dude does it), but we don't have a
> fixed size tuple.
>
> "Actually carrying", of laftygau, is properly a tuple: it's true of the
> pair of the blind dude and the seeing dude, and does not involve the
> supervisor and the guide.
Recte "lafmuvgau", I opine, per gimste s.v. "lafti".
> A tuple (or whatever) is a collective where the selbri holds only of
> the collective and not of the component individuals: it's all emergence.
[snip]
> The Nick-tuple may well be just a set.
Indeed, I think so. Though jbosets are modeled on mathsets, they have
properties which are by no means mathematical, simply because they are
outside the domain of mathematics, and in natlangs only mathematicians
talk of sets. E.g. laws are enacted by sets of legislators.
--
XQuery Blueberry DOM John Cowan
Entity parser dot-com jcowan@hidden.email
Abstract schemata http://www.reutershealth.com
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Infoset Unicode BOM --Richard Tobin