Goats' legs and counting

["Mark E. Shoulson" <shoulson@CTR.COLUMBIA.EDU>]

I've been mulling over John's comments about how in Lojban something like
{lo'e remna cu se tuple reda} has to be a complete enumeration.  Something
about it didn't sit right with me, and I think I have some worthwhile
comments on it.

John says the enumeration must be complete, that is, you can't say that a
goat has two legs, even though it has, because to speak completely, you
have to say it has four.  Well, let's play with some other expressions:

"He has small hands" can be expressed prettily and lojbanically as {ko'a se
xance lo cmalu} (I will not be forced to say {lo xance be ko'a cu cmalu}).
What if I want to say "He has one blue eye"?  John will forbid me from
saying {ko'a se kanla pa blanu} if in fact he has more than one eye.  Near
as I can tell, John's restriction boils down to making words like {kanla}
and {xance} and {tuple} mean not "is/are eye(s) of...", "is/are hand(s)
of..." and "is/are leg(s) of...", but rather "are all the eyes/hands/legs
of..."  He probably doesn't mean this, but it really seems the only way to
interpret his restriction.  Would I have to say {ko'a se kanla pa blanu ku
jo'u zo'e} in order to imply that he at least might have other eyes besides
the one blue one I mention?

Needless to say, this restructuring of body-parts causes some other major
problems.  Suddenly, {lo tuple} no longer means "at least one leg of
someone", but "at least one set of all the legs of someone".  There doesn't
seem to *be* a way to say "a leg", and {pa tuple} now seems nearly
synonymous with {lo pa tuple}.  No longer can somebody point to my left leg
and ask {ti mo} and get the response {ti tuple mi}; it must now be {ti jo'u
zo'e tuple mi}.  That's silly.

And don't start telling me it's only with {da}-series words.  Would John
permit me to say {lo'e kanba cu se tuple re tuple}?  I doubt it; it's
incomplete.  (I suppose I shouldn't have use {re tuple}, given my
discussion above; how about {re datci}).

Nor will I accept that it only works with numerals.  For one thing, that
breaks a lot of the Lojban model, and for another, everything is implicitly
quantified anyway.  Besides, what about "There were many things on the
floor, among them my foot (one of my feet)": {so'ida cpana le loldi .ije
pada jamfu mi}.  I'm told the ijek doesn't reset {da}'s, so this should be
right.

This seems to be another incarnation of the "only" discussion we had a
while back, with our different translations of "only".  John would have me
believe that {ko'a se kanla pa blanu} means "he has one blue eye *only*",
and that just doesn't seem to work for me.

~mark