Re: sets, masses, &c. (was: RE: [lojban] Re: [jboske] RE: Anything but tautol...

[And Rosta <arosta@uclan.ac.uk>]

>>> Jorge Llambias <jjllambias@hotmail.com> 03/06/02 03:35pm >>>
la and cusku di'e
#>No, but you could say "a bowl full of shirt" if the bowl is
#>full of shirts that have lost their shirtal integrity.
#Ok, to the extent that shirts that have lost their shirtal
#integrity are still shirts, they can be referred to as
#{loi creka}. But once they're no longer conceived as shirts,
#they are no longer creka. Even if in English they can be shirt
#when they are no longer shirts.

So basically then shirts that have lost their shirtal integrity
aren't, strictly speaking, {loi creka}, since (according to you,
but I am not disputing it) shirtal integrity is an inherent ingredient
of shirthood.

#>It does concern me, though (to the extent that
#>I care about lojban matters), that there seems to be no way
#>to talk about an English-type mass of things that have lost
#>their individuating characteristics but no other. Well, okay,
#>a lujvo based on marji provides a way, but any lujvo
#>ought to be paraphrasable by an expanded phrase
#>in which the lujvo components each form a separate
#>brivla.
#
#That's not a problem: {lo marji be loi plise} would be
#a quantity of material from apples.

That answers my original question, then. So presumably
{loi marji be loi plise} means that each part of loi marji comes
from loi plise, but not necessarily that each part of loi plise
goes into loi marji.

There are, though, still some problems. The first is that the
category derived from subtracting the individuating properties
from another category (as with mass nouns derived from
counts), is not necessarily equivalent to material; one
can massify immaterial things (e.g. misfortunes : misfortune).
However, we may suppose that some appropriate brivla
could be created. A second problem is that a mass (English
type) is not necessarily derived from a group (a Lojban mass);
the contents of a bucket of shirt need not at any time ever
have constituted individual discrete shirts.

#>If we can talk in Lojban about "re djacu", we conversely
#>should be able to talk about "a bowl full of apple". That is,
#>if we can countify what is basically a mass (in English), so
#>we ought to be able to massify what is basically a count.
#
#I'm not sure the symmetry is complete. It is a property of
#any material that it can be split into quantifiable chunks.
#It is not so clear that objects that are not essentially
#materials can always be meaningfully thought of as a material.
#If {plise} referred to "apple stuff" rather than to apples,
#then we could talk of individual apples as chunks of the
#stuff (among other possibilities), but as it is the only way
#to get to the stuff is to use a word for "stuff". {loi} only
#works so far as the stuff of one apple is still considered
#one apple.

I agree that the current Lojban situation is asymmetrical, 
but English is more symmetrical. Not that I'm saying Lojban
should be like English, but one would wish for it at least
not have too much trouble in accurately rendering the
meanings of English.

--And.