From melissa@fastanimals.com Mon Feb 23 17:54:21 2004 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Mon, 23 Feb 2004 17:54:52 -0800 (PST) Received: from [216.127.72.21] (helo=www.simlifecycle.com) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.30) id 1AvRm9-0000wW-JS for lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org; Mon, 23 Feb 2004 17:54:21 -0800 Received: from localhost (melissa@localhost) by www.simlifecycle.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id i1O1BLO16939 for ; Mon, 23 Feb 2004 19:11:21 -0600 Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2004 19:11:21 -0600 (CST) From: melissa@fastanimals.com X-X-Sender: melissa@www.simlifecycle.com To: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] precise definition of cmene Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-archive-position: 512 X-Approved-By: rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-original-sender: melissa@fastanimals.com Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-list: lojban-beginners _Lojban_For_Beginners_ informs me thusly: > cmene are typically understood to label one particular thing. Just as in > English, if I say Mary, I mean one particular person called Mary at a > time, no matter how many people there are in the world called Mary; so > in Lojban, meris. can only refer to one person. This means that cmene > normally do not stand for classes of things (like person, dog or > computer) or for relationships between things (like loves, gives or is > inside). I also learned that la is an article for names and le is an article for other stuff. Then I encountered this example sentence: > la tuitis. cipni la serinus.serinus.kanarias. > Tweety is a bird of species Serinus serinus canaria. "la serinus.serinus.kanarias."? It takes the "la" article, and is formed like a name. But in what way does this not stand for a class of things? There is a passing reference to "mass names" which don't stand for a particular thing. Is this an example of that? I am not seeing a crucial difference between Latin names like serinus.serinus.kanarias and common names like dog/gerku. What's up with this? The original goal was for me to assert that our dog is a mutt. My husband said it was as simple as la dinas. gerku la mutt I objected on the grounds that mutt couldn't be a cmene and wasn't in the correct form for a gismu. Upon exploration, we discovered what to us appears a point of confusion. -- Melissa H. Dogmom to Deena the wonder dog Mother to Nicholas, born 11/24/2002