From cbmvax!uunet!CUVMA.BITNET!LOJBAN Fri Dec 6 20:28:06 1991 Return-Path: Date: Fri Dec 6 20:28:06 1991 Message-Id: <9112062250.AA27778@relay1.UU.NET> Reply-To: David Cortesi Sender: Lojban list From: David Cortesi Subject: place structure of lujvo X-To: Lojban mailing list To: John Cowan , Eric Raymond , Eric Tiedemann Status: RO There's a recognized phenomenon in early language acquisition called "overgeneralizing," when a child first figures out a rule and then overapplies it. Picture the frustration of a 4?-year-old who has just discovered that the plural of "man" is not after all, "mans". Sometimes I feel like that child w.r.t. Lojban. What brings on the sensation most recently is a correspondence with Nick regarding his translation of Aesop. Brutally shortening, it goes like this: Nick (in story): le maxri lei manti se sudri'a Me: I read this as "the wheat the ants dryly caused" Nick: The x1 of sudga becomes the x2 of sudri'a...[further explanation, leading to]...sudga means is-dry; sudri'a is a single word meaning to dry: x1 dries x2 of x3 Me: You are saying that for gismu G and H, the argument pattern of a lujvo GH is: h1 GH g1... ? Nick: Actually, I was going with h1 g1 g2 ... h2 ... Me: I thought the arguments of a lujvo GH were just those of H. Nick: that seems to me an excessive restriction, which makes lujvo a very limited special case of tanru. Me: [subsides in bafflement] OK, I recognize that a lujvo is different from the tanru made from the same components. (I seem to recall Bob L. saying that it would be more specific, having only one conventional meaning out of all the possible interpretations to which a tanru is subject.) What I guess I don't understand is the range of possible differences. In particular, I am (like the 4-year-old) desperately looking for rules that I can apply. When I meet a strange lujvo, like Nick's "sudri'a," under what rules do I translate it? If I cannot simply unpack it to make a tanru and translate that, what am I supposed to do?