[YG Conlang Archives] > [jboske group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
At 03:48 PM 1/6/03 +0000, And Rosta wrote:
> Can you give a specific reference (one that does not ascribe countability > as an implication of the default quantifiers) No. But as John explained some weeks ago, the gismu were defined to be neutral wrt countability, with uncountable interpretation encoded by the application of loi and countable interpretation encoded by the application of lo. The issue of default quantifiers shouldn't matter, because any quantifier on lo will involve counting. It now occurs to me, though, that perhaps lo is not supposed to force a countable interpretation, in which case lo broda = da poi broda can stand. That is, perhaps the idea is that lo broda by virtue of its quantifiers involves counting, but does not require that each variable bound by the quantifier be *a single* broda. Perhaps Lojban does not have a way of forcing a countable interpretation.
Having just looked it up, I think that one place of mei is explicitly countable, since it is defined using a count and a membership. Whether this meets your needs, I cannot say.
(I correct my report of the cmavo list error in my last post responding to Jorge, because the final version of CLL added a 4th place to mei which never made it into the cmavo list at all; I don't remember this. Using the 4th place of mei does allow for indefinite number portions, but they are not expressed as fractional portions but as indefinite number portions. I suspect that this 4th place should have been left off and expressed using si'e with piso'i instead of so'i.)
-- lojbab lojbab@hidden.email Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org