[YG Conlang Archives] > [jboske group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
On Fri, 8 Aug 2003, And Rosta wrote: > xod: > > On Fri, 8 Aug 2003, And Rosta wrote: > > > 3. It is arguably correct that the cardinality of the mass of all > Five(s) > > > is tu'o rather than pa. Since we can't conceive of what re li mu would > > > be like, we can't know that there is exactly pa li mu. > > > > We know that we have one Five. And we can show that every other > > Five is identical. So we've proven that there is only one Five. > > No we haven't. We've shown that there isn't more than Five. But that > doesn't prove that it is countable, since for uncountables you can > also prove that there isn't more than one of them. I'm sure that whatever "uncountable" you offer as an example will be counted by me as unity. > > This is not trivial. The same type of proof can prove that there are only > > two integers between 0.1 and 2.1, a case that does not result in any > > answer which one is tempted to substitute tu'o. > > I don't dispute that there is one integer between 4.1 and 5.1. I fully > accept that integers are countable. But I am disputing whether fives are > countable. > > Likewise, I accept that people are countable, but dispute that xod is, > I accept that chemical elements are countable, but dispute that oxygen > is, and I accept that we can count kinds of Goo but dispute that we can > count a single kind of Goo. There's an old joke about how programmers start counting not at 1, but at 0. Apparently you start at 2. I'm not sure that the rest of us share that peculiarity. -- The Pentagon group believed it had a visionary strategy that would transform Iraq into an ally of Israel, remove a potential threat to the Persian Gulf oil trade and encircle Iran with U.S. friends and allies...