TECH: masses

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

After a lot of muddlepating on this since the last go-round and a lot
of reading in linguists (who aren't very useful) and logicians (who
are less so) and watching JCB struggling with the whole thing yet
again, I have become firmly convinced that xorxes and and are
right (thereby overthrowing a long-standing religious conviction).
As officially understood, the mass operators stand at one time or
another for at least three different notions; as practically used, they
stand for collectives, which is one of the options.  The other two
"obvious" possibilities are the Quinine/Trobriand/JCB
Gavagai/Rabbithood/Mr. Rabbit  ("species," for short) and "real"
masses: undifferentiated and shiftingly bounded continuities
(somebody's line but I can't find it again), singulars with a buried
plurality, like water and air and ... (since just about anything can be
so treated).  Most of the information available is on the last of
these, with the question being whether massness is a semantic
category or a particular use of other categories.  In the latter case,
the question is whether the use is in the noun or in the verb.
Lojban seems to go with nouns (a descriptor -- assuming that
Lojban really does deal with masses in this sense at all), logicians
and linguists either waffle or flip-flop, but seem to be coming
more and more toward the verb end of things: mass (in this sense)
sentences are about ways that the members of the set of items act,
not about different sorts of items. The species interpretation seems
to be about a different item all right but still one that reflects the
actions of individuals (as we -- but not serious Trobiranders --
would say) fairly directly and individually.  And the team notion
we know rather well, though the l&ls don't seem to do much with
it.  JCB is still trying to hold all of these together, since they share
some features (masses being taken nominally rather than verbally),
but their differences keep pulling the notion (and JCB's
explanations) apart; there keep being three answers to what
happens in such and such a case.  The collective sense seems to be
the one we get the most use out of , so we should probably tie it to
_loi_ and its analogs.  I think that resulting form would be a good
base for teh other two notions -- the verbal side of masses properly
speaking, certainly  (especially if _loi_ is _su'o loi_), and at least
plausibly for species.  But that needs to be explored separately,
after we have at least one notion nailed down.
pc>|83