Subject: Re: sets, masses, &c. (was: RE: [lojban] Re: [jboske] RE: Anything but tautol...

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 06 Mar 2002 15:35:29

la and cusku di'e

>No, but you could say "a bowl full of shirt" if the bowl is
>full of shirts that have lost their shirtal integrity.

Ok, to the extent that shirts that have lost their shirtal
integrity are still shirts, they can be referred to as
{loi creka}. But once they're no longer conceived as shirts,
they are no longer creka. Even if in English they can be shirt
when they are no longer shirts.

>It does concern me, though (to the extent that
>I care about lojban matters), that there seems to be no way
>to talk about an English-type mass of things that have lost
>their individuating characteristics but no other. Well, okay,
>a lujvo based on marji provides a way, but any lujvo
>ought to be paraphrasable by an expanded phrase
>in which the lujvo components each form a separate
>brivla.

That's not a problem: {lo marji be loi plise} would be
a quantity of material from apples.

>If we can talk in Lojban about "re djacu", we conversely
>should be able to talk about "a bowl full of apple". That is,
>if we can countify what is basically a mass (in English), so
>we ought to be able to massify what is basically a count.

I'm not sure the symmetry is complete. It is a property of
any material that it can be split into quantifiable chunks.
It is not so clear that objects that are not essentially
materials can always be meaningfully thought of as a material.
If {plise} referred to "apple stuff" rather than to apples,
then we could talk of individual apples as chunks of the
stuff (among other possibilities), but as it is the only way
to get to the stuff is to use a word for "stuff". {loi} only
works so far as the stuff of one apple is still considered
one apple.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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