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