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

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 07 Mar 2002 13:27:37

la and cusku di'e

>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.

I don't know about inherent, maybe a central ingredient.
I think what I'm saying is that {lo creka} and {loi creka}
ultimately refer to the same objects, in different ways.
Depending of the type of relationships those objects enter
you choose one or the other way of referring to them, but
it would never be the case that an object can be referred
to with one of them but not the other.

>#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.

I think that's right. I can't see much difference between
{loi marji be loi plise} and {lo marji be loi plise} though.

>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).

All right, but articles in Lojban are not used to change
categories. They provide different ways of referring to the
same category. We might need something other than {marji}
for categorical deindividuation, but I think it would
still have to be a brivla (or perhaps some other modifier,
something in NAhE?). {loi} only provides referential
deindividuation.

>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.

That shows what an unfortunate choice of word "mass" was
for the collective article. (JCB's choice, "set", was
equally unfortunate.)

>I agree that the current Lojban situation is asymmetrical,
>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.

I'm just not sure that articles is where this distinction
belongs to in Lojban.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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