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Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2000 20:18:46 EST
From: pycyn@aol.com
Subject: Re: [lojban] etc. = mass, apparently Addendum
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From: pycyn@aol.com

I assume the ethnic slur about Scots has to do with the actually Italian 
custom of making (and selling!) cigars made out of the butts of other cigars. 
 The answer has to be indefinite, since it is hard to imagine a minimum cigar 
with any accuracy (to differentiate it from a small bit of tobacco and hence 
from a minimum cigarette or snuff).  The case is different for water, 
however, for there the answer the sum from 1 to the number of water molecules 
in the volume, since each molecule and any combo of molecules up to the whole 
counts as a case of djacu.
As for gavagai, until we decide how little is needed to classify as gavagai, 
we still have to go with indefinites, but I assume that anywhere from 1 (all 
four rabbits clearly qualify as a single manifestation in Malinowski's 
description of Trobrianders) to the the total number of cells in the four 
together (the distinctive DNA of rabbits may be a rabbit minimum, but it is 
the smallest reasonable one and would not seem reasonable to a Trobriander, I 
think) -- or rather the sum over that sequence.
By the way, the goo masses can be handled with the ordinary mass notion by 
simply making the referent property the begooification of the group: one pred 
(bits of, or even goo of) modified by the original referent property.
pc

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