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Re: [lojban] Named multiples



On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 8:03 AM, Daniel Brockman <daniel@brockman.se> wrote:
> (I especially look forward to hearing xorxes' view on this.)

My view on this is that CMEVLA should be merged with BRIVLA. There is
really no reason to artificially restrict the syntactic possibilities
of CMEVLA.

> For example, I drive an Opel, so in Lojban I could say
>
>    .i mi klama fu lo me la .opel.

With ".opel." as a predicate, this would be:

       mi klama fu lo .opel.

> Lojban is ostensibly unmarked for number, but we Lojbanists are
> not used to named multiples; we only ever talk about named
> singles, like {la .lojban.} or {la .xorxes.}.

Right, because we usually do give names only to singles. "Opel" is not
really the "name" of your car, at least not any more than your dog's
name is "dog". "Opel" is what your car is:

   lo do karce cu .opel.

> Because of this de facto convention, we assume that {la .opel.}
> refers to a company or a *type* of car (singles), rather than to the
> cars (a multiple).  So in practice {la} is not number-agnostic.

CLL gives "me la spagetis" as an example of a type-2 fu'ivla. But saying

  mi citka la spagetis

sounds absolutely weird to me,  because "spagetis" is not a "name" in
the relevant sense. (The only sense in which it is a "name" is that it
has cmevla form.)

> But there's no ban on named multiples, so {klama fu la .opel.}
> should be perfectly okay, since it's obvious from context that in
> this case {la .opel.} is a multiple: "the cars named Opel."

But the cars are not "named" Opel any more than spaghetti are "named"
spaghetti. If all "la" does is "just like 'lo' except that the word
that follows ends in a consonant instead of a vowel", then we wouldn't
need "la" at all. What "la" says is that we don't care at all about
the meaning of the word that folllows, we care only about its form.
But when you say that you drive an Opel, the word Opel does have a
meaning, just like when you say you eat spaghetti, the word spaghetti
does have a meaning.

So the problem is not really with "lo me", which does (practically)
nothing, but with "la", which takes away the meaning of whatever
follows. When cmevla happen to have meaning, as in .opel. or
.spagetis., we don't really want to take it away from them.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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