[lojban-beginners] Re: Multiple masses/sets

[Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>]

On Saturday 05 September 2009 15:16:44 Squark Rabinovich wrote:
> *Hello everyone!
>
> lei nanmu ba bevri le pipno**
> *
> roughly means "the men are carrying the piano" with the implication that
> they're doing it together, as a "mass".
>
> *le'i nanmu cu barda*
>
> means that the set of men is large, that is, the men are many.
>
> What if I want to speak of two groups of men carrying pianos independantly?
> Is there a way to refer to several masses? What about several sets?

I think that would be "re lei nanmu cu bevri lo pipno". (I hadn't read this 
your message when answering your previous message.) Similarly "so'o le'i 
nanmu".

This reminds me of something I read in a book about linguistics in a back room 
of the San Francisco library. Navajo has fifteen grammatical numbers and 
fifteen genders. They are expressed together in words like "sinil", of which, 
because some are used for more than one combination, there are only 102. The 
fifteen numbers express whether things are in one, few, or many groups of 
one, few, or many things, and if few or many, whether they are organized or 
not.

Pierre