History: a lot of water

{so'i prenu} = "many people"
{pi so'i prenu} = "a lot of a person"
{so'i djacu} = "many amounts of water"
{pi so'i djacu} = "a lot of an amount of water"
??? = "a lot of water, too much water"

--And

lu'o so'i djacu or piso'i loi djacu, they both have the same sense. --xorxes
I may be missing something here, but neither of these seem right. If each amount of water is small then lu'o so'i djacu does not necessarily give you a lot of water: many waters do not necessarily amount to much water. And to me, pi so'i loi djacu implies a large proportion of the mass of all water, whereas "much water" means "a quantity that is large relative to the quantity that is normal". --And

I think they both mean "many amounts together". I don't think piso'i loi djacu is necessarily a large proportion of the mass of all water, because unlike so'a and so'e, so'i doesn't refer to the total. Do many people make a lot of people? Only in that sense can we say that many waters make a lot of water. In any case it is subjective. Too much water would be pidu'e loi djacu or lu'o du'e djacu, too many quantities of water together. All that djacu talks about is quantities of water, there is no way to describe those quantities with quantifiers, the only way of describing them is by modifying djacu with other brivla, as in lo djacu poi barda. --xorxes

1. I agree that lu'o so'i means "many amounts together".
2. so'e doesn't mean "a large proportion of"; it means "most", which, to oversimplify, means "more than half of". At any rate, we do want to distinguish between "a large amount of" and "a large proportion of", and I still feel that pi so'i is a better candidate for the latter.
   • I guess it makes sense to separate the two meanings.
3. Many people do make a lot of people, because the unit for measuring quantity of people is the single person. But since the quantity that constitutes pa djacu is undefined, the single amount of water cannot be the unit for measuring quantity of water, so many amounts of water do not necessarily make a lot of water.
   • Not in an absolute sense, but in the context of those quantities, I think they do.
   • Okay, yes. In a context when we are measuring quantity be amounts of water, then yes, many amounts do equal much water. But basically I stand by what I said before.
4. I think pidu'e loi djacu means "too large a proportion of". I agree about the meaning of lu'o du'e djacu.
   • Ok.
5. You may be right that "a lot of water, much water" cannot adequately be rendered using quantifiers, but if this is the case it is important to know, because it is being suggested that PA va'e and JAhA xi PA could be used to render "very" (etc. — see JAhA + CAI), in which case the PA should be a word meaning "much". If there is no quantifier meaning "much", then none of those solutions are going to work.
   • If pirova'e means "totally", why can't the other fractions mean "very much", "a little", etc? --xorxes
   • Because: (i) "totally" 'is' a proportion: pi ro = "the whole of", pi so'i = "a large proportion of". (ii) Applied to the scale of truth, I'd see pi PA as expressing points on the doubly-bounded scale of Sort-of between True and False. So pi so'i va'e would mean something like "pretty truish, sort-of but close to being outright true".

--And