From cowan@ccil.org Wed Aug 02 20:01:55 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 24973 invoked from network); 3 Aug 2000 02:50:31 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m1.onelist.org with QMQP; 3 Aug 2000 02:50:31 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO locke.ccil.org) (192.190.237.102) by mta1 with SMTP; 3 Aug 2000 02:50:30 -0000 Received: from localhost (cowan@localhost) by locke.ccil.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id XAA18372; Wed, 2 Aug 2000 23:35:11 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 23:35:11 -0400 (EDT) To: Pierre Abbat Cc: lojban@egroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] Beyond Whorf: "things," "qualities," and the origin of nouns and adjectives In-Reply-To: <00080222250501.00881@neofelis> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-eGroups-From: John Cowan From: John Cowan On Wed, 2 Aug 2000, Pierre Abbat wrote: > What's not clear to me is this: How do you say "that water bottle over there" > when the bottle is empty now, and whenever it has water in it, it's here? You say "le vu djacu botpi", where the implicit potentiality is "can and has" rather than "actually is". Only if the supposed water bottle neither has nor ever could contain anything will I deny that it's a "botpi", and even then, the non-veridicality of "le" saves you. -- John Cowan cowan@ccil.org C'est la` pourtant que se livre le sens du dire, de ce que, s'y conjuguant le nyania qui bruit des sexes en compagnie, il supplee a ce qu'entre eux, de rapport nyait pas. -- Jacques Lacan, "L'Etourdit"