My version of the Solution

[Nick Nicholas <opoudjis@optushome.com.au>]

As I said, I reject the plugged in values of the Excellent Solution, 
because I reject turning {lo} from individual to substance.

So, OK, this is what I think the status quo is:

Set lo'i
Individual (PA) lo / PA (lo)
Lojbanmass loi
(Substance) loi
(Collective) loi
Prototype lo'e?
Kind/Unique (lo'e?)
Mode (lo'e?)

(for 'collective' read 'tuple', if you prefer. Substance and 
collectives are officially kinds of Lojbanmass --- as indeed are 
individuals --- and ways of differentiating between them appear to be 
sketchy.)

This is what And proposed:

Set lo'i
Individual PA
Lojbanmass --
(Substance) lo
(Collective) loi
Prototype (lo'e?)
Kind/Unique lu'ai
Mode (lo'e?)

And this is what I now propose, as backwards compatible:

Set lo'i
Individual (PA) lo / PA (lo)
Lojbanmass loi
(Substance) loi
(Collective) lu'oi
Prototype lo'e
Kind/Unique lu'ai
Mode (lo fadni be lo'i)

Turning now to And's Fundie Advocacy:

The CLL premiss is that all entities can be coneptualised as 
countable (with boundaries intrinsic or extrinsic, and often 
culture-specific -- the point John made with 'pease'), and all 
entities can be coneptualised as uncountable. So

> Definition:
> X is a lojbanmass iff X is a single countable broda,

"If it's true of one of us, it's true of all of us." So one human 
being is {loi remna}. Intrinsically countable individuals count as 
Lojbanmass. Accepted.

> or X is a
> Group of broda

The couple that produce a child as a 2-tuple, and do not produce it 
each on their own; the two men actually holding each end of the piano 
(ignoring the supervisor as a distraction) are Lojbanmass. Accepted.

> or X is broda Substance

Accepted, by definition: substance is probably prototypical 
Lojbanmass. It makes for intrinsically uncountable stuff; what you 
get with the Universal Grinder.

Jordan's boorish "Heh" means I take it that he thinks these 
subclasses are not intrinsic to Lojban and niceties. Maybe, maybe 
not. But these all cohere with Lojbanmass in my understanding.

> There is a potential problem with the definition in that after
> loi/lei, inner PA when implicit is ro and not tu'o; i.e. loi/lei
> force a Collective reading, yet I think the CLL intention is that
> they should be able to do Substance. So we need to add the following:

Well, let's unpack that, because I think Bob muttered something that 
offers a way out. If the point of Lojbanmass is that you're not 
differentiating between intrinsic individuals, then of course the 
inner quantifier makes no sense (what's pa lei re dajacu counting, 
molecules?) If you think the inner quantifier is counting 
Lojban-individuals (pa lei re djacu is counting two quantities of 
water), then we're still in a mess, because the point was to regard 
water as just water, not to quantise it.

Bob said though that the inner quantifier was meant to be indicative 
of what bunch of stuff you're specifying with {lei} (with {loi}, it's 
always {ro} anyway, whatever the hell {ro} means for masses.) Which 
means you can tune it back out to {tu'o} as far as you're concerned: 
it's a heuristic, not an actual count of the uncountable.

> Addendum: If X is a lojbanmass with the defining properties of
> a Collective, X can have property P if X reconstrued as Substance
> can have P.

So: the 2-tuple of John and James is a collective and a lojbanmass.
The stuff that makes up John and James (if you put them through the 
Universal Grinder) has the property of being squishy.
Ergo, the 2-tupe of John and James is squishy.

Is that what you mean? I guess that's true.

OK. Now the flip side, deriving substances and collectives from lojbanmasses.

If something is true of {piro loi broda} and is also true of {rolo 
broda}, then broda is an individual.

If something is true of {piro loi broda} and is conceivaly true of 
{piro loi xadba be lo broda}, then broda is an substance. (So, chop 
each Lojban-individual in half, put them back together as a 
lojbanmass, and tell me if it's still the same thing.)

If something is true of {piro loi broda} and is not true of {ro lo 
broda}, and is also not true of {piro loi xadba be lo broda} then 
broda is an collective.

That covers emergence, right? It doesn't cover the "all of them at 
once" sense, which I was trying to get to last time. So the piano 
carrying supervisor belongs to a collective. Let's distinguish 
between the {bende}, which includes the supervisor, and the {kampu}, 
which doesn't. Between "John Paul and Hank", a lojbanmass truthfully 
involved in writing songs, and "John and Paul", a minimal such mass.

A frequent Lojban answer is that there is no difference between bende 
and kampu. If John is holding the door open and James is doing the 
lifting, they are both carrying the piano. If you want to include 
Hank out, you have to leave it to pragmatics.

I think it will often be true that what we think of as collectives 
are bende rather than kampu. I still think it's not always, and 
since I'm now losing interest, I suggest that the {kampu} (the 
'actually carrying' Jordan proposed, which I think is relevant) 
corresponds to jo'u and to the tuple, and is the minimum-sized 
lojbanmass of individuals of which the claim can be made.
--
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* Dr Nick Nicholas, French & Italian Studies nickn@unimelb.edu.au *
University of Melbourne, Australia http://www.opoudjis.net
* "Eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the *
circumscriptional appelations are excised." --- W. Mann & S. Thompson,
* _Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organisation_, 1987. *
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