From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Sat Sep 05 12:51:50 2009 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Sat, 05 Sep 2009 12:51:50 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1Mk1Ib-00054s-Px for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Sat, 05 Sep 2009 12:51:50 -0700 Received: from cdptpa-omtalb.mail.rr.com ([75.180.132.123]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1Mk1IY-00053q-DX for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Sat, 05 Sep 2009 12:51:49 -0700 Received: from chausie ([71.75.215.96]) by cdptpa-omta04.mail.rr.com with ESMTP id <20090905195140034.PGUR8566@cdptpa-omta04.mail.rr.com> for ; Sat, 5 Sep 2009 19:51:40 +0000 Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by chausie (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9FB3CC7AB for ; Sat, 5 Sep 2009 15:51:39 -0400 (EDT) From: Pierre Abbat To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: Multiple masses/sets Date: Sat, 5 Sep 2009 15:51:36 -0400 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.6 (enterprise 0.20070907.709405) References: <9ada8ecd0909051216g184556d0n4ddf35fad07f785b@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <9ada8ecd0909051216g184556d0n4ddf35fad07f785b@mail.gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-15" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200909051551.37773.phma@phma.optus.nu> X-archive-position: 2204 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: phma@phma.optus.nu Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@lojban.org X-list: lojban-beginners On Saturday 05 September 2009 15:16:44 Squark Rabinovich wrote: > *Hello everyone! > > lei nanmu ba bevri le pipno** > * > roughly means "the men are carrying the piano" with the implication that > they're doing it together, as a "mass". > > *le'i nanmu cu barda* > > means that the set of men is large, that is, the men are many. > > What if I want to speak of two groups of men carrying pianos independantly? > Is there a way to refer to several masses? What about several sets? I think that would be "re lei nanmu cu bevri lo pipno". (I hadn't read this your message when answering your previous message.) Similarly "so'o le'i nanmu". This reminds me of something I read in a book about linguistics in a back room of the San Francisco library. Navajo has fifteen grammatical numbers and fifteen genders. They are expressed together in words like "sinil", of which, because some are used for more than one combination, there are only 102. The fifteen numbers express whether things are in one, few, or many groups of one, few, or many things, and if few or many, whether they are organized or not. Pierre