Subject: Re: [lojban] Mass/Set

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2000 10:34:22 EST

Well, I don't know about citka, but "eat" stands for both an activity and a 
process generally. With a singular object -- or a determinate plural one -- 
it is taken as a process, since the object provides a natural terminus (the 
mark of a process, cf. "run"). But even then, English can return to the 
activity sense (every process is an activity until it is done, after all) by 
using "imperfect/continuing" markers: "He is/was eating an apple." Since 
aspect and tense are carefully separated -- and then ignored -- in Lojban, we 
ought not insist on any particular reading in general for a bare form, even 
in an assumed past time. In short, I think that taking a bite of an apple 
should count as a case of le nu citka lo plise or whatever, barring some 
further aspect marker to avoid uncertainty.

I am worried a bit by the continuing question about the members of a mass. I 
understand what is meant by the question -- that this is a thing that 
contributes to the overall output of the mass -- but not the wording. The 
set that the mass is ontologically has members, but the mass per se does not. 
How can the collaborative work of the individuals be that one of them is a 
member of that mass? At best, the addition is disjunction, but the putative 
member is not a member of any of these individuals , rather it is identical 
with one. So, one ought to say ko'e du lei broda, rather than cmimu. Unless 
-- and this opens up some great possibilities for a logical language -- cmimu 
is like Lesniewski's jest, the combination (or undistinction) of all the 
transitive "is"s: membership, identity, inclusion, part-whole.
pc