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la xod cusku di'e
> (Using loi'a to denote collectives) if I said loi'a prenu cu cadzu, that
> doesn't make sense, because walking is not an emergent property of
> pluralities of humans.
There are properties that are common to each/some of the members and
to the group. I don't see a problem with a group of people walking.
If we say "the group walked from the bus to the museum", that would
still be true even if one of the members of the group was a child
carried in arms by a parent, for example. It would not be the case
however that each member of the group walked. Furthemore, if the group
walked as a group, it would be misleading to insist on the
distributivity. If each member is walking in a different direction, it
does not make sense to say that the group is walking as a group, but
if it is walking as a group, it is more informative to say so and not
just say that each member is walking.
> If I said loi'a prenu cu cladu, it means that the
> crowd is noisy in the way that crowds are noisy, but not in the way that
> individuals are noisy.
Right. And I believe that the collective is the more common
interpretation of "those people are being very noisy".
> su'o prenu cu cladu is a different statement. So I
> can make a statement about a plurality which is a different statement if
> applied to the same plurality marked as a collective.
I think you and I agree. We just have different ideas about
which of the two situations is more basic/frequent.
> Different point: Pluralities use the gadri for individuals because each
> thing is taken as an individual; not because it makes any sense to speak
> of a plurality of one. A collective of one is equally meaningless.
Hopefully we both agree that {le pa broda} and {lei pa broda} are
equivalent ways of refering to an individual, given that a single
individual taken "one at a time" is equivalent to a single individual
taken "together".
mu'o mi'e xorxes
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