From jcowan@reutershealth.com Mon Jul 10 11:24:15 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 26376 invoked from network); 10 Jul 2000 18:21:25 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m4.onelist.org with QMQP; 10 Jul 2000 18:21:25 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail.reutershealth.com) (204.243.9.36) by mta1 with SMTP; 10 Jul 2000 18:21:24 -0000 Received: from reutershealth.com (IDENT:cowan@skunk.reutershealth.com [204.243.9.153]) by mail.reutershealth.com (Pro-8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id OAA27266; Mon, 10 Jul 2000 14:21:22 -0400 (EDT) Sender: cowan@mail.reutershealth.com Message-ID: <396A13E7.F5D749F9@reutershealth.com> Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2000 14:20:23 -0400 Organization: Reuters Health Information X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.2.5-15 i686) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: And Rosta , "lojban@onelist.com" Subject: Re: "which?" (was: RE: [lojban] centripetality: subset vs component References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: John Cowan And Rosta wrote: > > "You see here door number one, door number two, and door number three. > > Which [xomoi] door do you choose?" In any choice situation in which the > > choices are or plausibly could be numbered, "xomoi" is reasonable > > for "which?". > > But the answer would not normally be a number, right? Well, if you wanted to be comic about it you could reply "nu'a le xekri" (the-number the black-one), where "nu'a" converts an arbitrary sumti into a number. > Anyway, it might be reasonable for "which?", but does not seem wholly > satisfactory, since {xomoi} might equally be an enquiry about the ordinal > position of the referent rather than its identity, But on the Lockean principle of the identity of indiscernibles, if you know the ordinal position of something (given that the sequence to which it belongs is uniquely determined by context), then you know its identity as well. > I rather feel that a Q-word in LE and/or KOhA would have been added if > this problem had been noticed prior to the baseline. It was noticed: indeed Loglan has a word for "which" as does -gua!spi. The problem was a lack of theory, not a lack of opportunity. > As things stand, > {ma du} strikes me as the best way to say it, on the grounds that I > can think of no potentially relevant answer but one that specifies > which. That certainly works, provided your interlocutor is properly Gricean and doesn't just echo back the original description! -- Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis um dies! || John Cowan Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau, || http://www.reutershealth.com Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau, || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan Und trank die Milch vom Paradies. -- Coleridge (tr. Politzer)