On Thursday, April 29, 2004, at 12:21 PM, Philippe Caquant wrote:

[snip]
>>> but NOT, for ex,
>>> "A rose is a flower",
>>
>> Why not??? A rose, i.e. an individual rose, is an
>> instance of a flower!
>
> IMO, if you say "a rose is a flower", that normally
> means "the subcategory of roses belong to the category
> of flowers",

Does it? I think it depends very much on context. Personally, to express
"the subcategory of roses belong to the category of flowers", I would say
"Roses are flowers".

>  that's why I don't call it an instance
> (maybe the word is not the right one, even if I find
> it ok).

No - just the ambiguity of English "a rose is a flower".

[snip]
> You cannot subdivide it any more. The same
> with Winston Churchill. You can say that he was an
> Englishman, but not that something was a
> winston-churchill

Tho as John as pointed out, there have been and indeed there still is some
called "Winston Churchill" - but probably we shouldn't create a class for
these different Winston Churchills to be instances of  ;)

> (except of course in tropes: cet
> homme est un Harpagon = he is a miser).
>
>>
>>> and yet much less, "Rex is
>>> brown", "Rex is dead",
>>
>> Sorry, but I have to disagree. I see no a_priori
>> reason for denying that
>> Rex is an instance of Things-that-are-brown, or of
>> Dead-Things.
>
> No, really, I cannot feel it this way, although it's
> hard for me to explain exactly why, especially in
> English. I just feel that a "dog" is perceived as an
> entity (a thing of its own), while "a thing that is
> brown" is not [and yet, when you think of a dog, you
> probably imagine some particular kind of dog, a
> prototype; but what is the prototype of a brown thing
> ?]. These are two different concepts.

Oh yes - and, according to Plato, a brown dog partakes in both the Form
Dog and the Form Brown. I probably read too much Plato when I was young. I
must be clear that I do not agree with Plato's Theory of Forms, but I do
understand that it is possible to perceive things 'partaking' in Brownness.

[snip]
> non-philosoph, people, so what a linguist or a
> philosoph (or a scientist) might think is only
> incident: it doesn't necessary reflect the common
> sense.

Ah, what is common sense? Intuition?

[snip]
>> Rex is an instance of a son of Lassie. Even if
>> Lassie has no sons, we can
>> still form an abstraction Son-of-Lassie. When a son
>> appears, we have an
>> instantiation of the abstract Son-of-Lassie.
>
> Nonono. The kind of conceptual relation is not at all
> the same.

Isn't it. The classes of OOP are certainly abstractions. Altho Plato was
convinced his Forms were not abstractions but some more real than our
physical world, I go along with Aristotle in considering them as
abstractions. The "Flower" of which 'ma rose' is an instance is surely an
abstraction.

> The mixing up, IMO, precisely comes from the
> confusion in natlangs.

..and no doubt confusion in philosphy & human logic.

[snip]
>> we also have in English "to fox", "to wolf" and, I'm
>> certain, a few other
>> 'animal verbs' as well.
>
> Yes, and I believe there is a verb "to mouse" in
> English too. There seems to be much more of such verbs
> in English than in French. Do you happen to have a
> verb "to elephant" ? (if not, I at least found a
> proper example).

Nope - we don't seem to use 'elepant' as a verb - yet  ;)
===================================================================

On Thursday, April 29, 2004, at 01:15 PM, John Cowan wrote:
[snip]
> No, we don't; but if someone used it, I would understand it to mean "to
> walk like an elephant"

Umm - "She elephanted her way out of the room".

I think elephant might just be finding itself used as verb  ;)

> or just conceivably "to trumpet like an elephant".
> (Elephants, of course, were not anciently known in anglophone lands.)

Not too well - and in Middle English they were known as olifa(u)nts, from
Old French 'olifant', and were as fabulous to most people as basilisks,
cockatrices and all the rest of the medieval bestiary. 'Elephanant" and Fr.
  éléphant are remodellings after the Latin 'elephantus', itself a
borrowing from Greek 'elepha:s' (gen. elephantos).

> "To mouse" is the unusual one, because it means to catch mice rather
> than to act like a mouse; it is analogous to "to nail", meaning to fasten
> with nails.

Yes, and there's also a (almost inevitable?) nautical meaning of "to mouse"
  = to secure [something] with a 'mouse' (a knot or knob to prevent
slipping).

Fortunately, sailors of old were far less familiar with olifants than they
were with cats & mice, so AFAIK there's not a nautical term "to elephant"
or "to olifant".

Of course there's the verb "to heffalump" = to howl like mad with your
head stuck in an empty honey jar.
	:-)

Ray
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