From @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Thu Jan 14 19:02:24 1993 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Fri, 15 Jan 1993 00:05:01 -0500 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 8226; Fri, 15 Jan 93 00:04:03 EST Received: from CUVMB.BITNET by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 5478; Fri, 15 Jan 93 00:03:47 EST Date: Fri, 15 Jan 1993 00:02:24 -0500 Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Re: TECH: se, te, & lujvo X-To: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk X-Cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch Status: RO X-Status: 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. Maybe it has been so used, but not to my knowledge. The process of making a word into a lujvo vs. leaving it as a tanru in English is rather haphazard, since it is probabaly laypeople that do the merging (no doubt one of the inventors or early advancers of the sparkplug first wrote it as a single word). The are many English words that are still technically written as tanru, but which have a much more restricted meaning than the tanru technically has. Now you can say that someone could use such a tanru, as they could use "spark plug", in some way OTHER than the lujvo meaning, but only if there was strong context to support the different interpretation would people find it understandable as something else. 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. 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. lojbab