On Sun, 22 May 2011, Bryan Jurish wrote:
"Pair" is a word of English, and a highly ambiguous one at that -- it
might be an ordered pair, an unordered pair, a pair of pants, a pair of
aces,
Most pants are quite ordered...
'a pair' (aka "couple"), or whatever. Yes, it's semantically and
pragmatically complex. The (abstract) number "2" plays a pretty heavy
role in all of its sense I can think of at the moment, though.
In French, it's much more exciting : the word «pair» is pronounced the
same way as the word «even» (number), «peer», «father», «blue-green»
(eye colour), and some conjugations of «to lose».
Do you mean the semantics usually associated with the feature (singleton
vs. non-singleton set) -- it's kinda cool that zero tends to get lumped
in with plurals in English (but usually not in German)
In French, I think zero singular is most common, but zero plural isn't so
unusual. In Quechua, 'two' (pair of) has its own grammatical number.
I think I see what you're getting at, but I'm not sure where it's going.
I'll accept the "directly perceivable" term for current purposes, but
there's whole heckuvalot more going on in our heads (brains & associated
processes) when we look at and identify a small set of like items as a
set-of-N than I'm accustomed to calling "direct", and that's just the
stuff we know about...
Despite the numbers zero, one, two, three, four, five, and perhaps a few
more, are quite directly perceivable (as in everybody can count potatoes
instantly), along the years, people have had very various conceptions of
what those things are, such as zero not being a number, one being
non-plural, four being written as IV (one less than five), all those
numbers being part of «N», if you exclude 0 you call it «N*», or three
being written as {{},{{}},{{},{{}}}} in some axiomatic theories of
everything-is-a-set. Regardless of all the various thoughts that happened
around numbers, it remains that someone can see three or five potatoes in
a single step.
I'm talking about the kind of existence which is independent of the
current index, i.e. __necessary__ existence: existence in every possible
world.
I don't think that you or anyone is qualified to talk about all possible
worlds. I'm not quite convinced that anything that did not happen was
really possible at the moment that it did not happen at. It only looked
this way before the fact. ;)
"Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis": basically it states that `if you can't say it,
you can't think it', and it's been pretty much totally discredited by
now; i.e. just because you don't have a word for it doesn't mean you
can't perceive it / think it / know it / talk about it (indirectly).
Make that a sentence, or any number of sentences... it doesn't have to be
a word, no ?
_______________________________________________________________________
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
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