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Re: [lojban] Individuals and xorlo




On Thu, Feb 6, 2014 at 8:33 AM, selpa'i <seladwa@gmx.de> wrote:
la .guskant. cu cusku di'e

If you suggest another short term for "something in a domain of plural
variable, saying nothing about collectivity/distributivity", I would
abandon my usage of "mass" in this meaning.

A term that I've been using, but which doesn't seem to be very wide-spread (yet?), is "individual-collection". Anything that can be expressed as {X jo'u Y jo'u Z ...} is an individual collection and is identical to a {lo broda} with those {jo'u}-connected referents.

The problem with that, with whatever term is chosen in the metalanguage to talk about the language, is that the term eventually leaks into the language, and then collections become individuals too. That happened to "mass" very quickly, probably from the start, compounded with the problem that it was used for a lot of other things and not just for plural reference. I prefer to say that the domain of plural variables is just individuals, not something else, but that variables don't need to take one value at a time.

mu'o mi'e xorxes
  

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