Subject: Re: [lojban] kau -- What does it really mean?!

From: Invent Yourself <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2002 17:31:08 -0400 (EDT)

On Wed, 14 Aug 2002, Jordan DeLong wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 14, 2002 at 05:01:35PM -0400, Invent Yourself wrote:
> > On Wed, 14 Aug 2002, Jordan DeLong wrote:
> >
> > > On Wed, Aug 14, 2002 at 06:59:27PM +0000, Jorge Llambias wrote:
> > > [...]
> > > > Comment2: ????
> > > > The number of people here is a large number.
> > > >
> > > > You want to refer to the number of people here in
> > > > terms of the question "how many people are here?".
> > > > You want to extract a number from a proposition.
> > > >
> > >
> > > What's wrong with something along the lines of
> > > le ni zvati prenu cu barda
> > >
> > > I think this is maybe getting away from what the OP was talking
> > > about, but I think the 'ni' abstractor does what you want for above.
> >
> > ni doesn't count the number, it offers a quantitative version of ka. Yes,
> > it is about as useless as that sounds.
>
> Err, but that's exactly what we want here...

ni will give you the here-person-ness of the one or more people who are
here, as a quantity on some scale which measures such things, assuming
ce'u is in the first place of the tanru. It won't tell you the number of
souls who are here.

-- 
China's longest-serving political prisoner, Wang Wanxing, 52, is being
held at the Ankang Psychiatric Hospital for treatment of Political
Abnormality Illness.