Re: [jboske] kau

[John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>]

Jordan DeLong scripsit:

> A "quantity of water" is what a mass is in english. "lei djacu" is
> a mass of quantities of water. Or a mass of masses.

Nope. Trust me on this one. The intent when writing the gismu list
was to make "le djacu" a water individual.

For another example, see the contrast between "bean" and "rice".
In English, "bean" is a count noun, "rice" is a mass noun. Accordingly,
the English place structures for "dembi" and "rismi" say "x1 is a bean"
and "x1 is a quantity of rice" respectively. (A quantity could be as
little as a single grain).

Historically, "pease" was a mass noun as well, covering the same space as
"bean", but it came to be construed as a plural count noun "peas", and
a new singular "pea" was constructed for it. (Semantic differentiation
came later, and we can still talk of either black-eyed peas or black-eyed
beans.)

> However, as someone (and or nick or xorxes?) was saying, lojban
> masses aren't quite the same as it is in english, so calling it a
> "mass of masses" is mixing terminology (it's two different senses
> of the word "mass").

I don't know if you're talking about djacu or gunmi here, but in any case
a mass of masses is indistinguishable from a mass (unlike a set of sets,
which is not the same as a set of the elements of the sets).

-- 
John Cowan jcowan@reutershealth.com www.ccil.org/~cowan www.reutershealth.com
"If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on
the shoulders of giants."
--Isaac Newton