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Nick Nicholas scripsit:
> 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.
So far so good.
> 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?
No, because piroloi djacu is "all the water there is", but not a collective
of any sort. I don't see any reasonable way of making individual
waters into a collective without them becoming substance once more.
--
John Cowan jcowan@hidden.email http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Most languages are dramatically underdescribed, and at least one is
dramatically overdescribed. Still other languages are simultaneously
overdescribed and underdescribed. Welsh pertains to the third category.
--Alan King