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From: Philip Newton <pnewton@gmx.de>
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Subject: [jbovlaste] Re: crab
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On 16.09.2010 23:01, Jonathan Jones wrote:
> 2) Fluent jbopre are expected to be able to understand any gismu, cmavo,
> lujvo, etc. that they see without the need to consult a dictionary.

That's what philosophical languages set out to do, isn't it? Kind of 
take a thesaurus approach to things and divide things ever more finely 
until you have reached the level of precision you need, with the result 
that anybody can "understand any [new word] that they see without the 
need to consult a dictionary".

I don't think it's ever worked, and in any case, would be culturally 
specific since the way of dividing up the universe into semantic 
categories and subcategories is inherently culturally specific.

Also, I think that if you go this way, you either have to be unusably 
verbose (since you essentially have to quote the entire dictionary 
definition), or unusably arbitrary -- see, for example, 
http://www.carolandray.plus.com/Briefscript/SWwords.html#unsatisfactory 
, where compound words' meanings are derivable from those of their 
components, but sometimes very tenuously, such that you can only see the 
derivation when you know what the compound means in the first place. In 
which case you're essentially learning is as a semi-opaque new lexical 
item and might as well have gone with a completely-opaque one in the 
first place; the memory load will be very little higher.

See also http://www.carolandray.plus.com/Briefscript/itollis.html for 
another way where "[compounding] in such a way that the resulting 
compounds are self-evident at a glance" is typically wishful thinking.
(Lojban has the advantage of self-segregating morphology here, but the 
essentially arbitrary = unguessable meaning of lujvo compared to their 
component gismu and cmavo still stands IMO.)

I'm skeptical whether anyone can do better at this goal simply due to 
the nature of the beast, so I don't think it's a worthy goal to strive for.

> 3) Specifically regarding creatures: Nearly every creature with a name
> has a *descriptive* common name, and all Linnean names of things are
> descriptive, in the Latin language.

All of them? A nontrivial number of things are simply the Latin and/or 
Greek name for the thing, no? Such as _Vulpes vulpes_ (the Red Fox) 
which simply means "Fox fox", and is not descriptive in the least -- at 
least not in the "Redfurry Bushytailed" sense that you were possibly 
thinking of. Similarly, _Cygnus olor_ (the Mute Swan) is simply "Swan 
swan", though this time once in [Latin borrowed from] Greek and once in 
Latin.

>
> 4) As such, I see no reason why a descriptive cmene should not be
> preferable to a borrowed foreign cmene in *every* case.
>
> --
> mu'o mi'e .aionys.
>
> .i.a'o.e'e ko klama le bende pe denpa bu
>

mu'o mi'e .filip.