From colin@kindness.demon.co.uk Fri Apr 23 10:46:59 1999 X-Digest-Num: 122 Message-ID: <44114.122.698.959273824@eGroups.com> Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 18:46:59 +0100 From: Colin Fine Subject: Re: mut vecu'u le notci po'u <01be8b8d$85f30b20$LocalHost@jorge> la "=?us- ascii?Q?Jorge_J._Llamb=EDas?=" cu cusku di'e > >This brings me to a recent comment by Colin about the meaning >of Michael's {pa lei karce}, which was intended to mean "one of >the cars" and Colin took it to mean "the one mass of cars". I tend >to prefer the first meaning because it is so much more useful and >cannot, as far as I can tell, cause any ambiguity. I would tend to >interpret a quantifier of individuals (pa, re, ci, su'o, ro, so'i, etc) as >itself converting from mass to individual bypassing the need to >use {lu'a}. (Of course pisu'o, piro, piso'i, etc still work for masses.) >If that is acceptable, then in this case we could also say: >{e'u ro ma'a tugni}. Another example (used by several people) is >{coi ro do}, "Hello to each of you". If not interpreted like this, {ro} >is pretty meaningless there since there is only one "mass you". I like this suggestion (which I hadn't thought of). But I'm not entirely sure it works in general. The problem is that (in the feature analysis I am still toying with) I see +/-mass (kamgunma) as a feature of sumti and terbri, which must then match for a sentence to be semantically well- formed. I have no problem with an operator (some cmavo) explicitly altering this feature - 'lei' explicitly sets +kamgunma, and "lu'a" (if I've got the right one) sets -kamgunma. But your suggestion means that a na'uvla may or may not change the feature, depending on its numerical value, and I'm not happy with this. I need to think about this further - it may depend simply on the presence of 'pi', in which case we can in principle analyse the features without having to determine the meaning; but I'm not sure. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- | Colin Fine 66 High Ash, Shipley, W Yorks. BD18 1NE, UK | | Tel: 01274 592696/0976 635354 e-mail: colin@kindness.demon.co.uk | | "Don't just do something! Stand there!" | | - from 'Behold the Spirit' (workshop) | -----------------------------------------------------------------------