From LOJBAN%CUVMB.bitnet@YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU Sat Mar 6 22:52:52 2010 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Wed, 7 Jul 1993 00:11:36 -0400 Received: from YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 4000; Wed, 07 Jul 93 00:10:11 EDT Received: from YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU (NJE origin LISTSERV@YALEVM) by YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU (LMail V1.1d/1.7f) with BSMTP id 2055; Wed, 7 Jul 1993 00:10:10 -0400 Date: Wed, 7 Jul 1993 00:10:08 EDT Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Re: birthday? re. X-To: baube@optiplan.fi X-Cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch X-Status: Status: O X-From-Space-Date: Tue Jul 6 20:10:08 1993 X-From-Space-Address: @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Message-ID: Metalinguistic expression on the current expression is handled explicitly using the "sei" construct, which is preferred to parentheses, which are also possible if less explicitly metalinguistic. Lojban will tend to have words that are longer than their natlang equivalents, since your are limited to one meaning per word, and must thus expand the wordspace lengthwise to cram in the full range of natlang meanings. In this case, there is 'birthday', the day you were born, 'birthday', the anniversaries thereof, and 'birthday', the celebration, annual or otherwise thereof (a friend of mine used to ignore birthdays and celebrate thousand-days, and then there are always people born on leap days, or who celebrate on a day other than the anniversary for convenience). My lujvo would actually have a place structure something like x1 celebrates birthday of x2 on date x3. The concept 'birthday', as a noun, would then be longer since you must abstract it with "nu" the get the celebration, or convert it with "te" to get the date of the celebration (hmm, that's another split in meanings of 'birthday'), and then tag it with "le" to make it noun-like in grammar. So yes, the Lojban is longer than 3 syllables, but is a lot clearer as to what you are talking about in using the word. lojbab