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My ideology of how to fix the gadri impasse remains unchanged, and I remind myself and you of it:
(1) The Unique/Kind is a valid thing to introduce into Lojban (I do not eat the same meal as you do, but I do eat the same kind of meal), and deserves a LAhE
(2) The lojbanmass is a primitive in Lojban terms, and a composite in formal terms: is a conflation of individual, substance, and collective. There must be a disambiguation between substances and collectives, and at least some jboskeists accept that tu'o/ro does it. That may need some ironing out. We should also get over our distaste of sets and look at them more; they may well yield a good solution. If none of this works, we may end up with another LAhE; I don't believe this warrants another gadri.
****(3) I object to an intensional gadri mainly because a distinct gadri implies a distinct ontology --- but in propositionalist contexts, our old gadri serve us just fine (mi djica tu'a lo mikce). If propositionalism covers all intensional contexts, there is no problem to solve: this dissolves into prenex placing. I think the sane thing to do is to keep the gadri even in non-propositionalist contexts, and attach kludges to do with da'i, ka'e, and as yet uninvented UI. There are other solutions that should also be investigated before we latch on to a novel gadri -- such as 'Nixon prenexes' (the term is xod's, because I said that mid-sentence prenexes were first proposed in 1974).
Very often, we might need recourse to the other kludge, which is the lojbanmass: this clearly becomes the default for events instead of {lenu}, using the individual interpretation of the lojbanmass (the substance version makes no sense for events, and I doubt the collective one either; loinu as Any-event-x does, though.)
But I don't think the answer is another gadrow (in fact it cannot be, since masses are also intensional), nor is it to subtract specifity from {le}. I am committed to upholding the backward compatibility of the Lojban gadri paradigm as much as possible. And the fact that our current gadri work just fine in propositionalist contexts makes me distrust any tampering with gadri: that's not where the issue is. So there.
I was intending to summarise two papers which I think would help here --- Carlson's on Kind, and Link's on Masses and Collectives. But I found I couldn't speak Montague well enough; so I'm reading Dowty's introduction (which is very readable.) I have no idea if I'll get time to.
I've stalled on the BPFK because I'm trying to trace a candidate who isn't answering his mail. I intend to get it started before I leave town (20 Jan), and I intend a resolution to gadri to be an early task for it to tackle.
**** In other miscellaneous news:I just looked through a book on the classifiers of Kilivila, the language of our friends the Trobrianders. Yes, it is just a classifier language, nothing to learn here that John hasn't already learned from Chinese. As for the Mr Shark bizzo, like any mainstream linguist I'm sceptical of the "Gee whiz" exoticisation that underlies much Sapir-Whorfism. And classifiers pervade this language, they aren't limited to sharks: would Malinkowski claim that the Trobrianders really see all people as avatars of Mr Human? All songs as avatars of Mr Song? All daytimes as avatars of Mr Day? These people were animists, they weren't druggies. (Although with another mob I've come across, the Tariana of the Amazon, I have my doubts: they think every new day's sun is a brand new object.)
Reading through the Kilivila classifiers, and how they can be changed at will (so, three animals (individuals) of fish, three strings of fish, three plates of fish), I was reminded of the psychosis recently peddled here (I don't remember if it was Jorge or Bob, and whether it was serious or not), that lo nanmu can be a quantity of human, not just an individual, but potentially a bunch --- so lo nanmu could quite legitimately refer to one human, one team of humans, or one scoop of human flesh. Yes, it could. But no natural language is that fucked up, and I don't see why Lojban should be: the classifier languages, which allow nanmu to mean both individuals, bunches. and scoops of humanity, have perfectly distinct classifiers, thank you very much, to differentiate between these senses: they *say* "an individual of humanity", "a bunch of humanity", "a scoop of humanity". {lo nanmu}, mean all three? Who the hell does that benefit?
If you scratch beneath the surface, you will find default classifiers for different entities. The default classifier for people is going to be the individual. I have no compunction in making {lo nanmu} mean an individual, not by default, but always. {lo nanmu} comes with no classifier attached; why not make it the reasonable classifier?
So what to do about {lo rismi} -- is it a cup or a grain of rice? Here, I'm inclined to go all metaphysical bias after all. If we know the entity to be saliently, prototypically individuated in real life, {lo} refers to such an individual. If not (as with rice and peas), {lo} is truly ambiguous, and should be interrogable, {lo dembi} can be either a bean or a go of beans. But unless you're on drugs, {pa lo nanmu} cannot be a sextet. Allow it under defeasible circumstances, if you must, but it must still be absurd.
****If something truly is an event, then what it describes truly happens in the world. If something truly is a proposition, all that is required of it to meet propositionhood is that it have a predicate and arguments. It is pernicious folly to confuse the factivity of nu with du'u: du'u is a claim. I hope we won't see this confusion again.
Note to self: \lx.broda(x) denotes a set of x, but is a function mapping x to a proposition. This is an old confusion: the denotation of 'red' is all the red things in the world, but the actual job of 'red' is to map entities to 'yes, is red' and 'no, is not red'. So indeed it belongs in ka ce'u broda , which when satisfied maps to du'u ja'a broda and du'u na broda.
Lots of confusion to be had in this stuff. One thing we're entitled to feel smug about, though. Just as the Chinese were stumped by "White Horse Not Horse", Montague was stumped by "The temperature rises. The temperature rises. Therefore, ninety rises?" Think of how that is said in Lojban. Lojban can't fall for that. And you'll see why equative 'is' really is bad for you.
-- DR NICK NICHOLAS. FRENCH/ITALIAN, UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA. nickn@hidden.email Tour orghnie tou gerou na ninere, http://www.opoudjis.net tou p!ounte si na mh si ninere:"Hearken to an old man's advice --- not to his farts." Tsakonian proverb.