From LOJBAN%CUVMB.bitnet@YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU Sat Mar 6 22:44:38 2010 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by minerva.cis.yale.edu via SMTP; Thu, 24 Jun 1993 23:02:47 -0400 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 0188; Thu, 24 Jun 93 23:01:28 EDT Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 8879; Thu, 24 Jun 93 23:03:07 EST Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1993 23:01:44 EDT Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: pe'a/po'a; clarifying what John says X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch X-Status: Status: OR X-From-Space-Date: Thu Jun 24 19:01:44 1993 X-From-Space-Address: @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Message-ID: John said something glibly that will be misinterpreted, especially by And, I'm afraid. >tanru mean whatever the speaker wants This isn't quite true. They mean what ever the speaker wants, constrained by the fact that the place structure of this tanru is that of the final term. What is unconstrined, is the nature of how the first term is taken to modify the second. Thus risni jelca MUST be something burning, i.e. being consumed via chemical reaction in an atmosphere (or however the place structure goes). Exactly what the heart has to do with it is uncertain. Given this constraint, the nature of the lujvo risnyjelca is much clearer. It means some one specific meaning, from among those that moght be interpreted for the tanru, most likely the 'most-useful one', however that may be evaluated. For nonce use, this means 'whatever the speaker decides'. For adding such a word to the dictionary, we at least in theory have to be prepared to override someones nonce usage because we see a more obvious interpretation for a lujvo. It is not MANDATORY that a lujvo be selected from among the tanru meanings, but it is a strong norm. The animals discussion ongoing shows an area where brodybrode may not be one of the options for broda brode, but is instead somewhat orthogonal. "le'avla", which is short for the tanru se lebna tavla, has dropped the 'se', which is a little less according to the norms, but allowed when the word is common enough to suggest that Zipf should override the norm, AND the shorter word has no obvious other use. This latter course is most likely when the cmavo being deleted so not cause too much misleading to the listener who doesn't yet know the word (and there is always a time when you don't know a word, if only on first hearing it). Thus I would almost universally avoid deleting the pev- prefix, as well as the mal- and zan- prefixes for pejorative and ameliorative interpretation, simply because it causes confusion in a listener - which is the ultimate sin in a language which stresses communicativeness to the end of logical evaluation. This is to say that there may be a situation where I might approve of such a deletion, but I can't think of one, and it would take a lot of argument to convince me. On the other hand, in nonce use, unmarked figuarative lujvo may be tolerated (and in fact our most prolific Lojban poet, Michael Helsem, inflicts all kinds of figuratives on us when he writes - but then no one has ever said that they understood his poetry, either). I would consider such usage to be on the par with the use of "ain't" in a scholarly English paper, but that doesn't make it illegal, merely unacceptable. lojbab