Re: SURVEY: Idiomatic Expressions In Your ConLang Or ConCulture

Thomas Wier wrote:
> one's keys.  And such logical mismatches are even more deeply
> embedded, since a sentence like "Every man saw three dogs" has
> (for the vast majority of English speakers) precisely two readings:
> one where there is a set of three specific dogs which every man
> saw, and one where for every man, he saw three dogs, but not
> necessarily the same three dogs across the set of every man. So,
Isn't that just a problem with trying to read more into a sentence than
the words imply? You can't tell if all of the dogs were seen at the same
time and place or one after the other in different places. Why would you
expect to be able to tell if each man saw the exact same three dogs, if
this is unspecified? If it's a significant fact, it can be expressed as
"every man saw the three dogs", or to be extra clear, "every man saw the
same three dogs". English has many problems, but trying to find one in
"every man saw three dogs" when there are much more radical problems in
other areas seems a bit strange.