[YG Conlang Archives] > [jboske group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
la xod cusku di'e
> > I think you and I agree. We just have different ideas about
> > which of the two situations is more basic/frequent.
>
> Is this my western culture bias? I find it hard to consider constituent
> individuals as less basic than the groups they can form at times.
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that it is more common, when
talking about a group, to talk about properties that the group has
as a whole than about properties that all the members share. It is
more basic because it is logically simpler: in one case you are talking
about a single instance of the relationship, in the other case about as
many instances of the relationship as there are members.
> > 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".
>
> Except I think the latter form is at best unhelpful and misleading (Grice.
> Grice.),
But both are Griceanly inadequate to the same extent, in that one insists
about emergence and the other insists about distributivity when neither
concept applies.
> and at worst an interesting koan like zi'o crino -- given that I
> think loi'a should be used to draw the reader's attention to emergent
> properties, and no properties emerge from a collective with only one
> member.
And no property is distributable among one member either.
mu'o mi'e xorxes
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