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Date: Fri, 31 May 2013 14:27:04 -0400
From: "Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG" <lojbab@lojban.org>
Organization: The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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Subject: Re: [lojban] cmevla as a class of brivla
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selpa'i wrote:
> la .lojbab. cu cusku di'e
>> And as I see it, it is destroying the concept of Lojban as a
>> logical-predicate language.  I don't see anything "useful" about
>> treating a cmene as if it had a place structure, unless you are
>> meaningfully going to use that place structure.
>
> The currently proposed definitions give cmevla only a single place:
>
> x1 me la CMEVLA
>
> x1 me lo selcme be zo CMEVLA
>
> x1 selcme zo CMEVLA
>
> Maybe something could be done with cmene3, but it's probably safer to
> zi'o it out.

I had assumed cmevla meant exactly the opposite - a word used as a cmene 
which was NOT morphologically a name.  The morphological form of a name 
should probably not be a ...vla, but rather a ...tai or perhaps even 
...vlatai.

>
>> If I saw people making use of place structures in their brivla names, I
>> might be more sympathetic.  But they don't, and I suspect that
>> absolutely no one thinks about the x2 of tsani when they use that as his
>> name.
>
> Indeed, no one does, because {la} removes the meaning from the brivla so
> that only the string of letters/sounds is relevant. The form may hint at
> the original meaning of the brivla, but I doubt anyone thinks of a sky
> when they refer to {la tsani}, they think of *him*.
>
> I feel the same way about my own name. The name "selpa'i" is just a
> string of letters that I like the sound of. The meaning of the brivla is
> nice, but I would not claim that {mi selpa'i}, or in other words, I
> would not want people to infer {mi selpa'i} from {mi'e la selpa'i} or
> anything like that. And I wouldn't want to have to answer a question
> like "la selpa'i be ma". My name is not "selpa'i be <whatever>", it's
> "selpa'i".

All of this sounds like a good reason to not merge cmene and brivla, and 
indeed to more strongly police against the sort of name that you use. 
However much you aesthetically like selpa'i, it does have a predicate 
meaning and a place structure in Lojban.  Prepending it with "la" may 
tell someone to ignore that place structure (but of course you can 
attach places to brivla name-descriptions even with la present), but the 
merge proposal would seem to negate that.

 >{zo X} means the *word* X, not its meaning.

 >The place structure completely disappears.

But your name need not be marked with "la" or "zo", doi selpa'i (which 
could be vocatively referring to someone with that name, or to someone 
being affectionately called 'beloved' with an implicit x2, probably of 
the speaker.  When Marc Antony vocatively addresses "Friends, Romans, 
countrymen" in Shakespeare, those are descriptions and not names and 
would be brivla and not cmene.

In any event, we certainly need to discourage people from ignoring place 
structures if we want Lojban to be something other than encoded natlangs.

lojbab
-- 
Bob LeChevalier    lojbab@lojban.org    www.lojban.org
President and Founder, The Logical Language Group, Inc.

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