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Re: [lojban] xorlo and masses
I am glad to see we agree so much, raising the question of what it is that is relevant and we disagree about. Well, I am not suggesting that part-whole is even relevant to a word's meaning, not merely not essential. Whether the meaning presupposes a plurality in some place is part of the meaning but nothing to do d, per se, with part-whole. I admit I don't understand the next remark. The trouble with all those words for collection is just that, the ay are words for collections, which sound like something more / other than the things collected. The all each carry some semantic and emotional freight. I can imagine a conversation in which "An elephant is a brain plus what?" made sense (though maybe not with 'joi'), but not one where "An elephant is a brain." did. They're just the wrong sorts of things. Your last remark is more promising, since I take it to say (as I had trouble taking a lot of what went before) that things are fuzzy and words are vague and so there is an ultimate and inevitable indeterminacy in what we say. But that is a triviality, which hardly justifies the verbiage. And not quite is it the case that what is a whatever comes out in the discourse;it may but we may announce at the beginning, and define it's atoms: lo ci gerku, for instance.
Sent from my iPad
On Aug 21, 2011, at 17:25, tijlan <jbotijlan@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 21 August 2011 18:54, John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Secondly, descriptions refer to things in the domain of discourse, which need
>> not be mereologically closed either up or down, and usually isn't (when I talk
>> about rhinoceroses, I have never yet even thought about their brains, though I
>> would, if asked, have admitted they were se besna -- still not talking about
>> their brains.)
>
> I agree.
>
>
>> So much of what you say is off topic, indeed, irrelevant to
>> Lojban, as far as I can see. Part-whole has nothing to do with predication
>> (unless you include collective/distributive in it, where it does not strictly
>> belong).
>
> "the part-whole relation is not essential to the selbri's meaning",
> said I on 19 Aug.
>
>
>> Semantics is not biology or physics or ,,,, and syntax even less so.
>
> "be not too serious about whether the physical reality of a "rhino" is
> such that it must be more than a "brain"", 19 Aug.
>
>
>> I'm with Jones on this. The word "mass", which you don't use all that often,
>> admittedly, is totally useless for these conversations, so that is out.
>
> "mass", "group", "collection"... whichever appropriate word.
>
> I could ask this:
>
> lo xanto cu gunma lo besna joi ma
>
> ... which would be a response to Jonathan's presupposition that a
> rhino must be more than a brain. I say that such a presupposition is
> *not* necessary, that "lo xanto cu besna" can be ok.
>
>
>> Nor, contrary to your last remark, does what yu say have any obvious linguiatic
>> relation to 'lo besna' and 'lo xanto'.
>
> I discussed the non-linguistic aspects of brains etc. in response to
> Jonathan's non-linguistic assumptions (e.g. what a brain is a mass or
> part of). I tried to point out that there are fundamental fuzziness
> and arbitrariness in what we perceive as physical boundaries and
> wholes, if that's what he had meant by "mass". I then tried to suggest
> that the physical reality of anything is not essential to the way we
> handle objects in languages. That's my linguistic point. For me, what
> an object is a "mass" or part of, if ever, is ultimately determined by
> the logic that manifests over a discourse.
>
>
> mu'o
>
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