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la nitcion. cusku di'e
> One, Jorge says {loi} must be collective, because it has an inner
> quantifier, and inner quantifiers are only compatible with individuals,
> and if a Lojban string is grammatical it must be meaningful. To the
> last, I say bullshit. That's a bogus assumption, particularly since any
> fundamentalist solution to these problems will use existing grammar.
> Let some strings be meaningless.
+1
la .and. cusku di'e
> Which rule does the parser apply?
>
> A. Where KU is found, insert {ku}.
> B. Where KU is found, insert any member of KU.
>
> If A, then there is no problem in having other cmavo in KU.
> If B, then there is a problem, but why would B be preferable to A?
B. But that's not the point. The point is that "le ninmu cu cusku"
is considered grammatical because it can be unambiguously transformed
into "le ninmu ku cu cusku". If KU had both ku and ku'u'u as members,
then we wouldn't know whether "le ninmu cu cusku" meant what it formerly
meant, or meant "le ninmu ku'u'u cu cusku", and we would have to stop
saying "le ninmu cu cusku" -- which is not going to happen.
> Are you suggesting that a single predicate can be defined as "... that x2
> be true or actual". I suppose that is possible. I had been thinking that
> it would lead to polysemy, but with that definition it wouldn't. It's
> reminiscent of the way apparently-polysemous English _climb_ can be
> defined nonpolysemously as _clamber or ascend_ (the aeroplane climbed,
> the snail climbed the lamppost, the monkey climbed down the tree).
Just so. There is nothing improper about a Lojban predicate which means
one thing (in English terms) when applied to a concretum, and another
to an abstractum of a particular type, and yet another when applied to
an abstractum of a different type. As long as there is no ambiguity about
its meaning when applied to some *particular* set of arguments, all is well --
even in strange cases like "xrogomletulu", which means "is a woman" when
predicated of animates, and "is very small" when predicated of inanimates.
la nitcion. cusku di'e
> There's no real point in insisting that the remei is re unless you're
> counting its members as distinct participants in a joint process. (Like
> xod says, if you're really treating things as a mass, you're not
> counting anything, it's just a tu'omei.) This makes {mei} quite
> sensible for collective. And I honestly doubt anyone ever used it for
> substance;
+1
la xorxes. cusku di'e
> In most cases when we use {lei}, like in the case
> of the piano carriers, we mean {piro lei}. That's
> why I consider {piro} has to be the default. Using
> {pisu'o lei} in those cases, while making a true
> statement, is not what we want to say. That one
> of the men may be a supervisor changes nothing.
> He is one of the team and it is the whole team,
> supervisor included, that does the carrying. We
> still want {piro} in that case. It would be false
> to say that {piro lei re nanmu cu bevri le pipno}
> if the supervising by the third man was an
> integral part of the carrying. {pisu'o} is true
> because it allows the {piro} case, but it is
> the wrong quantifier to use because it also suggests
> {pime'iro}, which is often false in those cases.
+1
--
John Cowan jcowan@hidden.email
http://www.ccil.org/~cowan http://www.reutershealth.com
Thor Heyerdahl recounts his attempt to prove Rudyard Kipling's theory
that the mongoose first came to India on a raft from Polynesia.
--blurb for _Rikki-Kon-Tiki-Tavi_