Thank you. that makes things clearer :)
On Sunday, 31 January 2016 15:37:03 UTC+13, Pierre Abbat wrote:
On 01/31/16 01:43 AM, la .tamar. wrote:
> coi
>
> Does /so'e le mu mlatu/ mean most of 5 cats, e.g. 4 of 5 cats, or most
> of a cat of 5 cats, e.g. most of 1 cat out of the 5 I am talking about,
> or most of all the cats out of the 5 I am talking about (e.g. they are
> all missing tails or something)?
It means "most (4) of 5 cats". "Most of one of the 5 cats" would be
"piso'e le mu mlatu"; "piso'e lei mu mlatu" means "most of the 5 cats",
and is vague among interpretations like "4.5 of the cats" and "all but
the tails of all the cats".
> Similar thing here:
>
> Does /pa fi'u re lo ro mlatu /mean half of all cats, half a cat out of
> all cats, or all cats cut in half?
"pafi'ure lo ro mlatu" means half a cat out of all cats. "pafi'ure loi
ro mlatu" means half of all cats, which could be one individual out of
each pair of cats, or the left side of all male cats and the right side
of all female cats, or any similar interpretation. For half of the
individuals, I'd say "rofi'ure lo ro mlatu" or "pa lo'e re mlatu"
Those are my thoughts; I'm not sure that everyone else would agree.
Pierre