Subject: A rose is a rose is a rose...

From: "Alfred W. Tueting (Tüting)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 02 Jul 2000 19:09:18 -0000

Although knowing that Lojban was invented to prove the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis (hence avoiding the use of the verb "to be"), up 
to the "botpi" discussion I was not aware of the real
linguistical consequences followed in Lojban (and still am not sure
about this). 
My idea had been that Lojban just is lacking the verb "to be"
in all its forms like this is the fact in ancient 
("classical") Chinese 
or (partly) Russian and Hungarian language (e.g. Kung-tzu Lu ren ye,
"on tchielovek" or "az ember nem allat"). Yet, I
don't think 
that this infact can avoid "tagging" people, since even the
Chinese phrase states that Confucius *was/is/forever will be* a man 
from Lu.
So I'd imagine the only way could be to "verbalize" nouns
like in some Native American idioms, where a statement like, say,
"there 
are houses yonder" could be expressed as "it is housing far
over there" - /tu zdani/ or maybe simply /vu zdani/ (?). Thus
the 
idea could be expressed that something like a house, tree etc. is
somehow emanating its very being in a continuous ('materialized') 
stream - hence existing as long as it is active, grammatically
similar to 'the rain' (in many languages as English, German, French, 
Italian, Romanian etc. - and maybe Hungarian too): "it is raining",
"es regnet", "il pleut", "piove", "ploua" - "esik"(=it falls, 
namely "it=the falling").
Since Benjamin Lee Whorf dealt a lot with Native American idioms, he
e.g. was interested in categories of discriminating nouns and 
verbs: he found that in Hopi language 'referents' (events) of longer
duration are classified as nouns (e.g. house, man) whereas those 
of short duration as verbs (e.g. lightning, wave); and in the Nootka
language almost all words are grammatically verbs (s. above).
>From this, I now tend to assume that all selbri (gismu etc.)
grammatically are verbs rather than nouns, right?
If this is the fact, the well-known English phrase "A rose is a rose
is a rose..." (unusual in English grammar and hence its sense not 
quite obvious at first glance) in Lojban simply could be "lo rozgu cu
rozgu" or even just "rozgu".

Now, back to /botpi/: if it is right that a /botpi/ is not an
(actual) /botpi/ with its X2 unplaced (not just undefined), isn't its
non-
existence still more obvious (and comprehensive) when its 3rd place
X3 is /noda/? A /botpi/ that doesn't "glass" (plastic, ceramic 
etc.) is not even a potential /botpi/ (not even a virtual one in
one's mind). So, I think that /botpi/ (bottling) is only possible if 
this 'action' performs with all qualities of /botpi/ i.e. with all
places set with /da/ (just like rain is no longer rain when it stops 
raining). What is your opinion?

.aulun.