Re: mut

[Colin Fine <colin@kindness.demon.co.uk>]

vecu'u le notci po'u <01be8b8d$85f30b20$LocalHost@jorge> la "=?us-
ascii?Q?Jorge_J._Llamb=EDas?=" <jorge@intermedia.com.ar> cu cusku di'e
>
>This brings me to a recent comment by Colin about the meaning
>of Michael's {pa lei karce}, which was intended to mean "one of
>the cars" and Colin took it to mean "the one mass of cars". I tend
>to prefer the first meaning because it is so much more useful and
>cannot, as far as I can tell, cause any ambiguity. I would tend to
>interpret a quantifier of individuals (pa, re, ci, su'o, ro, so'i, etc) as
>itself converting from mass to individual bypassing the need to
>use {lu'a}. (Of course pisu'o, piro, piso'i, etc still work for masses.)
>If that is acceptable, then in this case we could also say:
>{e'u ro ma'a tugni}. Another example (used by several people) is
>{coi ro do}, "Hello to each of you". If not interpreted like this, {ro}
>is pretty meaningless there since there is only one "mass you".

I like this suggestion (which I hadn't thought of). But I'm not entirely
sure it works in general. The problem is that (in the feature analysis I
am still toying with) I see +/-mass (kamgunma) as a feature of sumti and
terbri, which must then match for a sentence to be semantically well-
formed. I have no problem with an operator (some cmavo) explicitly
altering this feature - 'lei' explicitly sets +kamgunma, and "lu'a" (if
I've got the right one) sets -kamgunma. But your suggestion means that a
na'uvla may or may not change the feature, depending on its numerical
value, and I'm not happy with this. 
I need to think about this further - it may depend simply on the
presence of 'pi', in which case we can in principle analyse the features
without having to determine the meaning; but I'm not sure.
-- 
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|     Colin Fine    66 High Ash, Shipley, W Yorks. BD18 1NE, UK       |
|  Tel: 01274 592696/0976 635354  e-mail:  colin@kindness.demon.co.uk |
|        "Don't just do something! Stand there!"                      |
|              - from 'Behold the Spirit' (workshop)                  |
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