From jcowan@reutershealth.com Thu Nov 01 11:22:18 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: jcowan@reutershealth.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_0_0_1); 1 Nov 2001 19:22:18 -0000 Received: (qmail 90693 invoked from network); 1 Nov 2001 19:21:47 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by 10.1.1.222 with QMQP; 1 Nov 2001 19:21:47 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail.reutershealth.com) (204.243.9.36) by mta2 with SMTP; 1 Nov 2001 19:21:47 -0000 Received: from reutershealth.com (IDENT:cowan@[192.168.3.11]) by mail.reutershealth.com (Pro-8.9.3/Pro-8.9.3) with ESMTP id OAA06437; Thu, 1 Nov 2001 14:22:53 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <3BE1A154.4080603@reutershealth.com> Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2001 14:24:04 -0500 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.5) Gecko/20011012 X-Accept-Language: en-us MIME-Version: 1.0 To: And Rosta Cc: lojban Subject: Re: countability (was: RE: [lojban] a construal of lo'e & le'e References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: John Cowan X-Yahoo-Profile: john_w_cowan And Rosta wrote: > I'll just note that there are two equally coherent but incompatible stories: > > A. "valsi" means "is a single word" (and so on for all countables, remna > etc.). {lu pa re ci li'u valsi} is false. > > B. "valsi" means "is word(s), is wordage" (and so on for all countables, remna etc.). {lu pa re ci li'u valsi} is true. However, "selci" is exceptional > in that it DOES mean "is a single unit" (according to my reading of Lojbab) I think that B is the underlying story, but that glorking gets you A most of the time. Consider Chinese nouns, which are all mass nouns (which is why you have to categorize them to apply a determiner or quantifier). ma3 = Horse, so to say "one horse" one has to say yi ge ma3, one unit of Horse. (It may be that ma3 demands a specific categorizer; I don't recall.) Normally, a unit of Horse is going to be a horse, but it's *conceivable* that in the right circumstances it won't be. This, BTW, is why Chinese philosophy very early had the insight "White-Horse is not Horse". In a language with count nouns, this gets mistranslated "A white horse is not a horse", which is false; but when applied to masses, it is perfectly correct. Even without the Chinese example, it is far from clear that the count/mass distinction is very natural: rice is mass, oats are count (or are they mass with a false plural suffix?), peas used to be mass but are now count (pease > peas, generating the unhistorical singular "pea"). -- Not to perambulate || John Cowan the corridors || http://www.reutershealth.com during the hours of repose || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan in the boots of ascension. \\ Sign in Austrian ski-resort hotel