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At 08:12 PM 1/11/03 +0000, Jorge Llambias wrote:
la nitcion cusku di'e
>The set of natural numbers has cardinality aleph-0
>The set of real numbers has a cardinality, and it is aleph-1.
>That means that there are proper subsets of real numbers that are
>countable: N is a subset of R. It also means it is feasible to speak of
>'all' over a transfinite set. It's just that the set is not countable.
But "real numbers" are not substance. A real number is a countable
thing, even if there are uncountably many of them.
_Bits_ of substance are uncountably many, just like real numbers,
but substance is not "many" in any sense.
There is the mathematical notion of "uncountably many", which can
only apply to semantic countables, like real numbers or bits of
substance, and there is the semantic notion of "uncountable" in
the sense of there being no individuals to count. {ro} indicates
semantic countability, not mathematical countability.
I was going to post it elsewhere, but it fits here better. I think people have been failing to use the resources of the language. We certainly do not need tu'o for any sense of uncountable I've seen.
For uncountable transfinite, we have ci'iFor uncountable extremely large finite, we have so'a, recalling that "so'i" means "many", and so'e has to be enough larger as to make "many" seem too small, and so'a larger still in the same sense. All of the so'V words are uncountable numbers with varying degrees of size attached, and the use of so'u as a standard quantifier shows that they can convey some important senses.
lojbab -- 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