Re: [lojban-beginners] merli

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 12:59 PM, Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu> wrote:
> On Sunday 12 September 2010 09:56:15 Jorge Llambías wrote:
>> That's how I use it. Except that the "scale (si'o)" also doesn't make
>> sense to me. I would say:
>>
>>   mi merli lo karce li re lo mitre
>>   "I measure the car to be 2 meters."
>>
>> They want you to say instead something like:
>>
>>   mi merli lo ni lo karce cu clani kei li re lo si'o mitre
>
> "lo si'o mitre" is correct. lo mitre is some object or path or whatever whose
> length is measured in meters;

The archetype of the things measured in meters is the meter itself.

> lo si'o mitre is the meter as a unit.

To me it's the idea that something is some number of meters long in
some direction.

"lo si'o mitre", "lo si'o se mitre" and "lo si'o te mitre" are one and
the same idea, right?

> "mi merli lo karce" is sumti-raising, and in this example, I'd take it to mean
> the width, not the length, which is closer to 4 m of cars I'm familiar with.
> I'd say "mi merli lo karce nilcla" to specify without saying so many
> syllables.

Of course you can always be more precise. You could also say instead
that the ve merli is "lo mitre be fi lo nilcla", which are
specifically "meters of length".

When you say "mi viska lo karce", you can always be more precise and
say that what you see is the front side of the car, or the left side,
but that doesn't mean that a car cannot be seen. Similarly, you can
say that you measure the length of a car, but you can also say that
what you measure is the car itself.

> As to the accuracy: English has the oddity that an accuracy of 1 millimeter is
> greater than an accuracy of 10 millimeters. I think that accuracy of a
> quantity expressed in meters should be expressed in diopters.

What would you use for the accuracy of merli? Diopters or the idea of
diopters? I think it makes more sense to use the same dimension as in
x4 though.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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