tech:masses

["John E. Clifford" <pcliffje@CRL.COM>]

cowan (on and):
>  X is right that "he is a house builder" does not entail that
> there is a house he has built.
First of all, I have trouble with this statement if extended tenselessly.
I "He is a house builder" really compatible with "He never has and never
will build any house whatsoever?"
Second, note that tenseless Lojban bridi (unlike their English translations)
are potentially any of "caa", "ka'e", "nu'i", or "pu'e".  Is "He is a house
builder" really compatible with "There does not [tenselessly] exist any house
that he is capable of building?"
pc:
I am unsure about houses, except as part of the general point.  In my
salad days on the beach at Venice (CA), I  knew several poets who
never had and never would produce a poem and -- I am pretty sure --
were incapable of doing so, so I think that however you tense it "there
is a poem that he produced" is going to be false.  And  the same surely
applies in a number of other professions, lawyers who never do
anything that lawyers do (not clear just what that is, but thse guys
avoid doing anything at all), advisors who never give advice, and so
on. But (and this is the point of having such professions) no one could
call them a liar when they wrote whatever they hit on in the blank
"Occupation:"  I suspect that houseless housebuilders are called
contractors or construction engineers or some such usually.

The point, as and reminds us, is that all those habitual and gneric
and professional and ... labels have the potential, at least, for
opacity and needs a warning and perhaps a marker to prevent
problems.

As for porridgification (I think I came in late in that discussion,
since it sounds familiar once mentioned, but I can't find it in my
archives), it is, of course, whatever the English (and so on)
count/mass distinction is.  The point I thought I was trying to make
originally about that was that linguists now locate the distinction
not in noun phrases (gadri or at least whole sumti) but in verb
phrases and that, for Lojban, this seemed a perfectly useful way to
operate, with the assumption that the subject of such verb phrases
would probably be collectivist _loi_ expressions.  We can talk
about  _lei mlatu_ in terms of trasverse cuts, even of Osterizing,
without insisting that we do these things to the participants.
I am less comfortable with Mr. Rabbit, but it too can be viewed as
a kind of collective --  of all the rabbits there are (or were or will
be), which thereby accomplishes whatever (within odd bounds)
any rabbit or group of rabbits does -- where the bounds are in the
verb phrase again -- only the sum of weight but each individual
habitation -- that it does come out rather like a kind of
porridgification, in being a restriction on verb phrases.
(The mass interpretation of _loi_ got into the langauge mainly
through JCB believing that all Chinese words were mass words --
the necessity of the "one piecee man" pidgin -- and he wanted to be
sure to offer Chinese Loglanists a comfortable entree into the
language. That that entree was also later asked to serve for
Trobrianders -- or Quinians, Malinowski's description has not held
up well in later research -- and that it got mixed with amorphous
cases without natural piecees is a typical bit of  Lo??an history.)

and:
Your understanding of {loe}, we arrived at with much blood sweat
& tears [& tho it makes sense I can't believe it was the intention
when loe was invented (and I believe there to have been no
intelligent reason behind the addition of {lee})].
pc:
Well, what IS this hard-won understanding?  I can make no sense
of xorxes' examples, but that is largely because of the added
problem of opacity.  Archetype? (best example or something in the
realm of ideas?)

"shiftingly bounded continuities" is from either the linguists or the
logicians I have been reading: Jeff Pelletier, McCawley, Hans Kamp, ....
I just can't find it again.

pc>|83