From LOJBAN%CUVMB.bitnet@YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU Sat Mar 6 22:59:42 2010 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Fri, 15 Jan 1993 16:12:10 -0500 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 1522; Fri, 15 Jan 93 16:11:10 EST Received: from CUVMB.BITNET by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 9572; Fri, 15 Jan 93 16:10:54 EST Date: Fri, 15 Jan 1993 21:08:27 +0000 Reply-To: And Rosta as a Sender: Lojban list From: And Rosta as a Subject: Re: TECH: se, te, & lujvo X-To: lojban@cuvma.BITNET, Logical Language Group To: Erik Rauch In-Reply-To: (Your message of Fri, 15 Jan 93 00:02:24 EST.) <9301150502.AA28089@daily.grebyn.com> Status: RO X-Status: X-From-Space-Date: Fri Jan 15 21:08:27 1993 X-From-Space-Address: @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Message-ID: > The problem is that I cannot for the life of me think of a reason why someone > would use the 'tanru' to mean anything other than the lujvo. Two electric appliances are plugged into the wall. One of them often emits sparks; I and my wife both know this. I say: "unplug the spark plug". This means 'unplug the plug associated with a spark'. If I'd said "unplug the sparkplug" (i.e. lujvo rather than tanru), & English were like Lojban in not allowing one dictionary word (=brivla?) to have more than one meaning, then my utterance could not have meant literally 'unplug the plug associated with a spark'. > If I were to walk up to someone and call t > them a "grand father", they would certainly presume that I meant the lujvo > unless I strongly accented the separation of the two words. This example is not good for your argument, since when a tanru the primary stress is on FA (because _grand_ is an adjective), and when a lujvo the primary stress is on GRAND. Cf. _greenhouse : green house_, _blackboard : black board_. > But I doubt that > anyone would presume that a "killer whale" or a "blue whale" is anything other >than the particular species that are so labelled, that a rusty can in the trash > could be called a "garbage can" (tghough the tanru is valid), etc. If I want to talk about a whale that is blue, I can. The confusion is that English, unlike Lojban, does not always distinguish morphologically between tanru and lujvo. In lojban if I wanted to talk about the species blue whale I would obviously use a lujvo (or lehavla, but not a tanru), & if talking about a whale that is blue I would use a tanru. I really cannot believe I am saying anything controversial here. Now, to return to my original question, which I will now answer. I now reckon, as a result of all this discussion, that semantically _se jerna_ and _seljerna_ are equivalent, and that the unpredictable meaning of most lujvo comes from their being derived from tanru, not from their being lujvo. In this case, there is no place for _seljerna_ in the dictionary, and _seljerna_ is merely a stylistic variant of _se jerna_. ---- And.