Re: Number/Specificality/Archetypes in Language

This I found interesting, although a little bit
confused. I have to think it over, but here are just
some remarks:

- I don't think "maleness" can be an archetype for all
men, because it doesn't refer to mankind. Animals and
plants can be male or female too. Perhaps
"male-mankind" ?

- there is a difference between "the set of all men"
and "the characteristics common to all men".
Strangely, in French we use the same word,
"humanite'": "L'humanite' court a sa perte" = mankind
is running toward its ruin", vs: "Il n'y avait pas
trace d'humanite' dans son regard" = there was nothing
human in his gaze"

- a group can be considered as an entity, for ex an
army is composed of soldiers, officers, horses etc,
but it is also a thing on its own; so is a forest. In
French, there is an hesitation in some cases, one may
say "une foule de gens se rassembla" or "une foule de
gens se rassemblerent" (a crowd [of people] gathered).
From a purely syntactic standpoint one should say "se
rassembla", but both are admitted.

- a subset is defined by specific characteristics (or
attributes, or properties) of the set, therefore it is
perfectly possible that the subset contains 0, 1 or n
elements. The subset of all men who walked on Mars is
empty (in 2004). It might not always be.

(BTW, another interesting question: when I say: "The
Americans elected a President named Bush", "The
Americans walked on the Moon", and "The Americans
fought against each other during Secession War"), what
does "the Americans" mean in each case ? Seems they
are different sets, or subsets).

- I guess that" The men went to the supermarket" is
usually understood as: they were more or less
together. If not, one usually specifies: one by one,
separately, at different times, in small groups, etc.
Is this distinction a matter of number, or rather an
adverbial one (the *way* they went), this could be
discussed. This implies time (shall we go back to the
Hopi problem: is "three" the same concept in "three
days" as in "three men" ?)

(Mass and count nouns have already been discussed
quite heartily here).

--- Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...>
wrote:

> Okay... I was reading a book called "the 100
> greatest philosophers" out
> of boredom during my lunchbreak at my part time job,
> and I was reading
> the section on Plato (I think), talking about
> archetypes etc, and I was
> thinking about how this relates to qualifiers,
> quantifiers, plurality
> etc. It seems to me... if a common noun represents
> an archetype, say
> "man", then we can get from that:
> the archetype itself (perhaps "maleness"?)
> the set of instantiations of the architype ("all
> men")
> a subset of the complete set
> an individual member of the set ("a/the man")
>
>  And then I started wondering if any languages
> "number" system actually
> makes this four way distinction... and from that I
> got onto the problem
> of the definition of subset, since a subset can
> contain only one
> element, or, in set theory at least, no elements at
> all (the null set is
> a subset of all sets including itself), so the
> distinctions above don't
> necessarily make any distinction between singular
> and plural (and how do
> you handle mass nouns? Count the whole set as the
> set every single
> "atom", "molecule", "point", whatever of the
> substance and then use
> subsets but not individual members? Or some other
> approach?), and
> started thinking about making other distinctions
> such as plurality or
> specificality (if we distinguish specificality in
> this system then it
> seems to me that taken as a whole we mostly do away
> with the need for
> qualifying words such as "any" etc).
>  I was also thinking about what it means to have a
> plural argument to a
> verb... take for instance "The men went to the
> supermarket". This
> amounts to feeding each member of the group "the
> men" to the verb, with
> (often) the added implication that each of them went
> in a way somehow
> related to the others going. If I said "John went to
> the supermarket,
> and Fred went to the supermarket, and..." then I am
> not necessarily
> implying that they did it together or that each of
> them going is related
> in any way. Most languages have an easy way of
> giving the first meaning,
> but the second seems to me more tricky. In English
> we'd usually use
> "each" I think, as for example in: "Each man went to
> the supermarket" or
> "Each of the men went to the supermarket". This
> removes the implication
> that the events are related, or at least makes them
> more distantly
> related.
[snip]

=====
Philippe Caquant


Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intellegor illis (Ovidius).

Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo (Horatius).

Interdum stultus opportune loquitur (Henry Fielding).

Scire leges non hoc est verba earum tenere, sed vim ac potestatem (Somebody).

Melius est ut scandalum oriatur, quam ut veritas relinquatur (Somebody else).

Ceterum censeo *vi* esse oblitterandum (Me).


		
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