From arosta@uclan.ac.uk Wed Mar 06 23:32:27 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: arosta@uclan.ac.uk X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: unknown); 7 Mar 2002 07:32:27 -0000 Received: (qmail 20666 invoked from network); 6 Mar 2002 16:53:09 -0000 Received: from unknown (216.115.97.172) by m4.grp.snv.yahoo.com with QMQP; 6 Mar 2002 16:53:09 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO com1.uclan.ac.uk) (193.61.255.3) by mta2.grp.snv.yahoo.com with SMTP; 6 Mar 2002 16:53:08 -0000 Received: from gwise-gw1.uclan.ac.uk by com1.uclan.ac.uk with SMTP (Mailer); Wed, 6 Mar 2002 16:26:18 +0000 Received: from DI1-Message_Server by gwise-gw1.uclan.ac.uk with Novell_GroupWise; Wed, 06 Mar 2002 16:53:08 +0000 Message-Id: X-Mailer: Novell GroupWise 5.5.2 Date: Wed, 06 Mar 2002 16:53:01 +0000 To: lojban Subject: Re: sets, masses, &c. (was: RE: [lojban] Re: [jboske] RE: Anything but tautol... Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Disposition: inline From: And Rosta X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=810630 X-Yahoo-Profile: andjamin >>> Jorge Llambias 03/06/02 03:35pm >>> 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. So basically then shirts that have lost their shirtal integrity aren't, strictly speaking, {loi creka}, since (according to you, but I am not disputing it) shirtal integrity is an inherent ingredient of shirthood. #>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. That answers my original question, then. So presumably {loi marji be loi plise} means that each part of loi marji comes from loi plise, but not necessarily that each part of loi plise goes into loi marji. There are, though, still some problems. The first is that the category derived from subtracting the individuating properties from another category (as with mass nouns derived from counts), is not necessarily equivalent to material; one can massify immaterial things (e.g. misfortunes : misfortune). However, we may suppose that some appropriate brivla could be created. A second problem is that a mass (English type) is not necessarily derived from a group (a Lojban mass); the contents of a bucket of shirt need not at any time ever have constituted individual discrete shirts. #>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. I agree that the current Lojban situation is asymmetrical,=20 but English is more symmetrical. Not that I'm saying Lojban should be like English, but one would wish for it at least not have too much trouble in accurately rendering the meanings of English. --And.