From LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU Thu Dec 21 11:55:31 1995 Reply-To: "John E. Clifford" Date: Thu Dec 21 11:55:31 1995 Sender: Lojban list From: "John E. Clifford" Subject: tech:masses X-To: lojban list To: John Cowan Status: OR Message-ID: cowan (on and): > X is right that "he is a house builder" does not entail that > there is a house he has built. First of all, I have trouble with this statement if extended tenselessly. I "He is a house builder" really compatible with "He never has and never will build any house whatsoever?" Second, note that tenseless Lojban bridi (unlike their English translations) are potentially any of "caa", "ka'e", "nu'i", or "pu'e". Is "He is a house builder" really compatible with "There does not [tenselessly] exist any house that he is capable of building?" pc: I am unsure about houses, except as part of the general point. In my salad days on the beach at Venice (CA), I knew several poets who never had and never would produce a poem and -- I am pretty sure -- were incapable of doing so, so I think that however you tense it "there is a poem that he produced" is going to be false. And the same surely applies in a number of other professions, lawyers who never do anything that lawyers do (not clear just what that is, but thse guys avoid doing anything at all), advisors who never give advice, and so on. But (and this is the point of having such professions) no one could call them a liar when they wrote whatever they hit on in the blank "Occupation:" I suspect that houseless housebuilders are called contractors or construction engineers or some such usually. The point, as and reminds us, is that all those habitual and gneric and professional and ... labels have the potential, at least, for opacity and needs a warning and perhaps a marker to prevent problems. As for porridgification (I think I came in late in that discussion, since it sounds familiar once mentioned, but I can't find it in my archives), it is, of course, whatever the English (and so on) count/mass distinction is. The point I thought I was trying to make originally about that was that linguists now locate the distinction not in noun phrases (gadri or at least whole sumti) but in verb phrases and that, for Lojban, this seemed a perfectly useful way to operate, with the assumption that the subject of such verb phrases would probably be collectivist _loi_ expressions. We can talk about _lei mlatu_ in terms of trasverse cuts, even of Osterizing, without insisting that we do these things to the participants. I am less comfortable with Mr. Rabbit, but it too can be viewed as a kind of collective -- of all the rabbits there are (or were or will be), which thereby accomplishes whatever (within odd bounds) any rabbit or group of rabbits does -- where the bounds are in the verb phrase again -- only the sum of weight but each individual habitation -- that it does come out rather like a kind of porridgification, in being a restriction on verb phrases. (The mass interpretation of _loi_ got into the langauge mainly through JCB believing that all Chinese words were mass words -- the necessity of the "one piecee man" pidgin -- and he wanted to be sure to offer Chinese Loglanists a comfortable entree into the language. That that entree was also later asked to serve for Trobrianders -- or Quinians, Malinowski's description has not held up well in later research -- and that it got mixed with amorphous cases without natural piecees is a typical bit of Lo??an history.) and: Your understanding of {loe}, we arrived at with much blood sweat & tears [& tho it makes sense I can't believe it was the intention when loe was invented (and I believe there to have been no intelligent reason behind the addition of {lee})]. pc: Well, what IS this hard-won understanding? I can make no sense of xorxes' examples, but that is largely because of the added problem of opacity. Archetype? (best example or something in the realm of ideas?) "shiftingly bounded continuities" is from either the linguists or the logicians I have been reading: Jeff Pelletier, McCawley, Hans Kamp, .... I just can't find it again. pc>|83