Subject: Re: [lojban] po'u considered harmful

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2002 13:29:53 -0500

And Rosta wrote:

> And what makes {du} different from {me}, semantically? Is there a
> minimal pair illustrating the difference?

mi me le ci nolraitru = I am Caspar, Melchior, or Balthazar.
mi du le ci nolraitru = We are Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar.
("Oh, I am the Cook, and the Captain bold/And the Mate of the
_Nancy_ brig/And the Bosun tight/And the Midshipmite/And the
Crew of the Captain's gig." -- W.S. Gilbert; see
http://www.jsward.com/shanty/poems/NancyBell.html . I learned
this poem from my father by oral tradition.)

> #It means that the collective referred to by "mi" and the
> #collective referred to by "la bab." are the same collective,
> 
> Ah, I see. But in that case if 'mi' has plural reference then
> "mi poi prenu" would be false, since although each of is a
> person, the lot of us taken together is not a person. So how
> does one get the distributive reading within relative phrases?

Umm, by "collective" I meant "distributive", although we
do not have in English the noun "a distributive".

> "mi poi me la bab"? That should mean (if I have understood
> you) "the group of us that is a referent of 'la bab'", i.e. the
> group is named 'bab'.

No, that's yet another possible reading. "la bab." can be
"the individual Bob" or "the individuals Bob" or "the group named
Bob" (or indeed "the groups named Bob").

> I take them to be individuals, like sets, but able to inherit properties
> from their members.

Whereas I want something distinct from individuals, yet having no
properties of their own (unlike masses). The properties of dogs or
Bobs are the properties of each dog or Bob, taken distributively.

-- 
Not to perambulate || John Cowan <[email-masked]>
the corridors || http://www.reutershealth.com
during the hours of repose || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
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