Re: [jboske] What is a lojbanmass? Quantification

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

cu'u la lojbab
> At 02:38 PM 1/9/03 +1100, Nick Nicholas wrote:
> > In fact, with respect to some predicates (distributives), it is
> > clearly nonsense to say that the given property is emergent: if the
> > Beatles die, all four die.

> I think that is a case of English ambiguity. The Beatles died when the
> first of them died, because no longer were the Beatles alive (or capable of
> performing as "The Beatles"). This gets even more complicated with a
group like the Moody Blues, which has had its membership change.

Bob, do not tell me there is no such thing as a distributive 
property. If 'die' confuses you (because you are generalising it to 
"cease to function", rather than leaving it as "cease to breathe"), 
then change it to 'are human beings'. "The Beatles are human" implies 
"each Beatle is human". So humanity is not an emergent property, but 
a distributive one.

> I erased it, but I don't understand what could be meant by "re loi broda"
> since piroloi broda is the mass of all the broda there is. What does it
> mean to discuss two masses of all there is?

I did write "is meaningless" for that case: don't erase so hastily. 
Blatantly obviously, we also want to be able to discuss masses of 
less than all there is, though. You know perfectly well what {re lo 
djacu} is, and what {re lei djacu} is. And each glassful of water is 
a substance.
--
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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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