RE: [jboske] Transfinites

[Robert LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>]

At 11:05 PM 1/13/03 +0000, And Rosta wrote:
> Suppose for a moment that you did understand {zi'o catra ko'a} to
> mean "ko'a dies". Then that bridi doesn't say whether or not
> somebody killed ko'a.
>
> In this instance, you can equally well say {ko'a mrobi'o}, to talk
> about dying. But how do we talk about bottles and tigers in general,
> rather than lidded bottles and striped tigers in particular?

By using the as yet unspecified brivla that mean (English) bottles and 
(English) tigers. If we eschew jvajvo rules, we can use "glibaubotpi" and 
"glibautirxu" to mean precisely whatever English speakers mean by saying "X 
is a bottle" and "X is a tiger" respectively.

We set up a number of container words. I did not try to map one-to-one 
with English, but tried to decompose the semantics. botpi was assigned to 
a container with lid, and includes a standard bottle, a jar, a stoppered 
flask, Aladdin lamp. patxu was assigned to a deep container with or 
without a lid. It simply is wrong to assume that a lidless bottle is 
necessarily anything like an English bottle with its lid removed.

tirxu is tougher to argue. We were thinking more metaphorically then and 
zebra = tirxyxirma or xirmytirxu was obvious. A tiger kitten was as much a 
"tiger" as the kind found in the zoo. If I recall, we considered briefly 
making the x2 place refer to any species-identifying pattern in the pelt in 
which case "tirxu" would not necessarily have anything to do with cats, but 
the reason for including a gismu for tiger along with lion also included 
the possibility of tapping into cultural significance of the animal, and 
tigers have significance other than for their pelt coloring, so the word 
remained taxonomically biological for a great cat but we left in the place 
for the markings to tap into that concept when relevant, and to distinguish 
the tirxu great cats from the cinfo great cats. So a tirxu fi zi'o might 
be a cinfo or it might mean an albino, but I don't know because we never 
contemplated what tirxu would mean without a pattern place.

I don't think that the projection caused by deleting a place is necessarily 
all that clear, and it seems to me in all my illogic that those instances 
where we think the projection "obvious" will significantly differ from 
culture to culture. Every language may have a word for bottle which is 
invariant whether it has a lid, but is that symmetrically true, that every 
word for a lidded container really does not hinge on whether there is a lid 
or not? Is a lid of container a lid, if there is no container it 
fits? zi'o the lid place or zi'o the container place, and the semantics 
should be equally clear, if we can use zi'o freely and intuitively. I 
don't think that holds.

But as for the gismu, we were trying for broader words usable in many 
compounds rather than the most useful set of words as standalone gismu, and 
while we had more sense of order to our lujvo-coining than JCB had, we had 
no concept of jvojva, and indeed had rejected JCB's quasi-jvojva because 
they made no compositional sense (e.g. using the rafsi for "make"/zbasu in 
final position for agentivity.)

lojbab

--
lojbab lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org