From jcowan@reutershealth.com Mon Jan 14 10:26:01 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: jcowan@reutershealth.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_0_1_3); 14 Jan 2002 18:26:00 -0000 Received: (qmail 43805 invoked from network); 14 Jan 2002 18:26:00 -0000 Received: from unknown (216.115.97.172) by m3.grp.snv.yahoo.com with QMQP; 14 Jan 2002 18:26:00 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail.reutershealth.com) (204.243.9.36) by mta2.grp.snv.yahoo.com with SMTP; 14 Jan 2002 18:25:59 -0000 Received: from reutershealth.com (IDENT:cowan@[10.65.117.21]) by mail.reutershealth.com (Pro-8.9.3/Pro-8.9.3) with ESMTP id NAA03033; Mon, 14 Jan 2002 13:26:35 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <3C4323A1.3040701@reutershealth.com> Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2002 13:29:53 -0500 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.6) Gecko/20011120 X-Accept-Language: en-us MIME-Version: 1.0 To: And Rosta Cc: lojban Subject: Re: [lojban] po'u considered harmful References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: John Cowan X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=8122456 X-Yahoo-Profile: john_w_cowan X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 12924 And Rosta wrote: > And what makes {du} different from {me}, semantically? Is there a > minimal pair illustrating the difference? mi me le ci nolraitru = I am Caspar, Melchior, or Balthazar. mi du le ci nolraitru = We are Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. ("Oh, I am the Cook, and the Captain bold/And the Mate of the _Nancy_ brig/And the Bosun tight/And the Midshipmite/And the Crew of the Captain's gig." -- W.S. Gilbert; see http://www.jsward.com/shanty/poems/NancyBell.html . I learned this poem from my father by oral tradition.) > #It means that the collective referred to by "mi" and the > #collective referred to by "la bab." are the same collective, > > Ah, I see. But in that case if 'mi' has plural reference then > "mi poi prenu" would be false, since although each of is a > person, the lot of us taken together is not a person. So how > does one get the distributive reading within relative phrases? Umm, by "collective" I meant "distributive", although we do not have in English the noun "a distributive". > "mi poi me la bab"? That should mean (if I have understood > you) "the group of us that is a referent of 'la bab'", i.e. the > group is named 'bab'. No, that's yet another possible reading. "la bab." can be "the individual Bob" or "the individuals Bob" or "the group named Bob" (or indeed "the groups named Bob"). > I take them to be individuals, like sets, but able to inherit properties > from their members. Whereas I want something distinct from individuals, yet having no properties of their own (unlike masses). The properties of dogs or Bobs are the properties of each dog or Bob, taken distributively. -- Not to perambulate || John Cowan the corridors || http://www.reutershealth.com during the hours of repose || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan in the boots of ascension. \\ Sign in Austrian ski-resort hotel