Re: Subject: Re: TEXT: pemci

[ucleaar <ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk>]

Jorge:
> At the risk of invoking the ire of the gods, I will say that in my
> opinion Lojban does distinguish between singular and plural, albeit
> not exactly like English.
> That is the basic distinction between {le} and {lei}. (Also between
> lo and loi, but it is easier to see it in the specific case.)
> Of course, having a sort of plural doesn't make Lojban any more
> English-like than if it didn't have it, and if people don't like
> calling this a plural I don't mind, but I think it is.

Since the collective/distributive distinction only makes sense for
categories with >1 member, and since we seem to feel that lVi is
more 'marked' than lV, it is true that lVi pragmatically implies
plurality. But this is not a grammatical number distinction, of
course, and it doesn't apply to distributives: lV does not pragmatically
imply singularity [interestingly, I think we tend to assume in the
absence of contextual clues to the contrary that lV is referring
to a single entity (at least I do). I have no idea whether this is
my English bias or whether speakers of languages without obligatory
number distinction would do the same].

---
And