From pycyn@aol.com Sun Jun 25 18:51:55 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 7399 invoked from network); 26 Jun 2000 01:51:52 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m4.onelist.org with QMQP; 26 Jun 2000 01:51:52 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO imo-r17.mx.aol.com) (152.163.225.71) by mta1 with SMTP; 26 Jun 2000 01:51:52 -0000 Received: from Pycyn@aol.com by imo-r17.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v27.10.) id a.b6.6f1fc39 (4069) for ; Sun, 25 Jun 2000 21:51:40 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2000 21:51:39 EDT Subject: As Kunsunlundz said... [was RE: RECORD:containers] To: lojban@egroups.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: AOL 3.0 16-bit for Windows sub 41 From: pycyn@aol.com Well, he actually said that a white horse is not a horse, but "An empty bottle is not a bottle" does not seem a great improvement. It does solve some of the problems, of course, but not all (the implication from {ta tanxe} still works, for example) and it has the peculiar result that we need to know the history and content of an object to know what it is -- though not what it might be. This seems backward from what we would normally do or say or experience: we see and say that something is a bottle or a nest or whatever, long before we can see what is in it or even when we never do find out. Now, I suppose the point is that {botpi} doesn't mean "bottle" but something else that amounts to "bottle" in most situations, but in those (often unidentifiable) situations it only means "could-be bottle". However, lb wisely gave up that basic "could-be" reading explicitly in revising Loglan (at about the same time it less wisely gave up basic comparative reading on adjectives -- but that is another story). To bring it back now to solve a small part of a minor problem seems ill-advised, not to mention a bretrayal of the grounds of the earlier decision. I think some other approach is called for to solve this dilemma, even if this one would work for the whole thing.