Re: THEORY nouns and cases (was: Verbs derived from noun cases)

Philippe Caquant scripsit:

> IMO, if you say "a rose is a flower", that normally
> means "the subcategory of roses belong to the category
> of flowers", that's why I don't call it an instance
> (maybe the word is not the right one, even if I find
> it ok). But when the Little Prince (in Saint-Exupery)
> talks about "ma rose", this is a final (individual)
> instance. You cannot subdivide it any more.
Lojban allows you to make the following distinct claims (verbs are
capitalized):

	This rose IS-A-FLOWER.
	The set of roses IS-A-SUBSET-OF the set of flowers.
	The 'rose' mass individual IS-A-COMPONENT-OF the 'flower' mass
		individual.
	The typical (i.e. Platonic) rose IS-A-FLOWER.

> The same with Winston Churchill. You can say that he was an Englishman,
> but not that something was a winston-churchill (except of course in
> tropes: cet homme est un Harpagon = he is a miser).
Winston Churchill certainly was a winston-churchill; indeed, the only one.
(Interestingly, he wasn't the only person, or even the only famous person,
to bear the name "Winston Churchill"; he published his books under the
variant "Winston S. Churchill" to avoid confusion with the then-well-known
but now nearly forgotten American novelist Winston Churchill.)

> No, really, I cannot feel it this way, although it's
> hard for me to explain exactly why, especially in
> English. I just feel that a "dog" is perceived as an
> entity (a thing of its own), while "a thing that is
> brown" is not [and yet, when you think of a dog, you
> probably imagine some particular kind of dog, a
> prototype; but what is the prototype of a brown thing
> ?].
A good counterexample is "fist", which is a noun in the IE languages and
Chinese (and probably lots of others) despite the obvious fact that it
represents a certain state of the hand, and sometimes even inchoatively
so:  "He clenched his fists" refers to the hands as fists even though
they don't become fists until after they are clenched.  So our feeling
for noun-ness is mere habit.

> Yes, and I believe there is a verb "to mouse" in
> English too. There seems to be much more of such verbs
> in English than in French. Do you happen to have a
> verb "to elephant" ? (if not, I at least found a
> proper example).
No, we don't; but if someone used it, I would understand it to mean "to
walk like an elephant" or just conceivably "to trumpet like an elephant".
(Elephants, of course, were not anciently known in anglophone lands.)

"To mouse" is the unusual one, because it means to catch mice rather
than to act like a mouse; it is analogous to "to nail", meaning to fasten
with nails.

--
But that, he realized, was a foolish            John Cowan
thought; as no one knew better than he          jcowan@reutershealth.com
that the Wall had no other side.                http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
        --Arthur C. Clarke, "The Wall of Darkness"

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