From nicholas@uci.edu Thu Aug 02 15:36:05 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: nicholas@uci.edu X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_2_0); 2 Aug 2001 22:36:05 -0000 Received: (qmail 35851 invoked from network); 2 Aug 2001 22:36:03 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by l7.egroups.com with QMQP; 2 Aug 2001 22:36:03 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO e4e.oac.uci.edu) (128.200.222.10) by mta2 with SMTP; 2 Aug 2001 22:36:03 -0000 Received: from localhost (nicholas@localhost) by e4e.oac.uci.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id PAA23491; Thu, 2 Aug 2001 15:36:03 -0700 (PDT) X-Authentication-Warning: e4e.oac.uci.edu: nicholas owned process doing -bs Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2001 15:36:03 -0700 (PDT) X-Sender: To: Cc: Nick NICHOLAS Subject: From the Wiki: The 17 tallest men Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII From: Nick NICHOLAS The question on "How do you say the 17 tallest men" came up in the Wiki; this is what I've proposed, but I think it should be more widely discussed: **** Taking a preliminary stab, and using a formal (explicit) rather than informal expression: * .i lo nanmu pazemei poi ke'a traji leka ce'u xadni clani This is a property the 17 hold in common as a unit; so anything said of them has to be said of a mass. A more colloquial version then might be: * .i lei paze nanmu poi traji leka xadni clani Problem is, of course, (a) when you're saying a mass is superlative, are you saying it relative to all other individuals, or other masses? (b) since the 17 are a well-defined set, you cannot allow an individual member of the mass to 'opt out' (the 17mei cannot include the 42moi), which actually sounds a lot more like a set. A __set__ solution would be: * .i le'i paze nanmu poi ro lu'a ke'a zmadu roda poi na cmima ke'a kei leni xadni clani But sets don't seem to me to work with ''traji'', and I think that if you have more than a singleton in the x1 of ''traji'', they can reasonably be presumed to be ranked #1, #2, #3... -- == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == Nick Nicholas, Breathing {le'o ko na rivbi fi'inai palci je tolvri danlu} nicholas@uci.edu -- Miguel Cervantes tr. Jorge LLambias