From pycyn@aol.com Sun Mar 12 07:34:09 2000 Received: (qmail 19235 invoked from network); 12 Mar 2000 15:34:29 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m3.onelist.org with QMQP; 12 Mar 2000 15:34:29 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO imo19.mx.aol.com) (152.163.225.9) by mta1.onelist.com with SMTP; 12 Mar 2000 15:34:29 -0000 Received: from Pycyn@aol.com by imo19.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v25.3.) id h.d3.2774929 (8479) for ; Sun, 12 Mar 2000 10:34:22 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2000 10:34:22 EST Subject: Re: [lojban] Mass/Set To: lojban@onelist.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: AOL 4.0 for Windows sub 33 X-eGroups-From: Pycyn@aol.com From: pycyn@aol.com 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