X-Digest-Num: 102
Message-ID: <44114.102.567.959273824@eGroups.com>
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 21:58:36 -0300
From: "Pablo Stafforini" <cancrians@iname.com>
Subject: Re: la zen.
X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 567
Content-Length: 3173
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> For example, in Lojban, {ninmu} means "a female humanoid person".
>  The English word
> "woman" means "a female human adult", the Greek "gineka" means "a
> married female
> human" and the Turkish "kadIn" means "a female human non-virgin"
> (actually, it's not
> even that simple, since the meaning also changes according to
> context).  Leaving
> _everything_ up to everyday use would result in different
> meanings of {ninmu} similar
> to some of the translation errors we see between natlangs.  I've
> just finished writing
> a piece on Turkish, which concludes with the following exchange I
> had with a Turkish
> student (in English) ...

First, sorry about the misspelling of lujvo. I guess I confused the "jvo"
with the "jbo" because of the rafsi {jbo} for the gismu {lojbo}. (bad
excuse!)

As regards the text by robin, I would say the problem is that there's never
an exact definition for a lujvo, since its construction derives from 2 or
more gismu (or cmavo). It's never perfectly clear what "xxx type-of yyy"
means. In fact, I believe the claim for semantical precision is illusory,
since, well, there's always a level of "tolerance" for interpreting a
certain word. Every word is, strictly speaking, a metaphor. It certainly
takes a high degree of abstraction (= "metaphorization") to apply the notion
of the "middle" of a square to the "middle" of the day, or the "middle" of a
process. And we can take this example to any degree whatsoever. For example,
the "door" of a car is not the "door" of a house; etc. We must, if we want
to stick to our claim of "unambiguity", to go on and create new words ad
infinitum.
	Don't get me wrong: I think Lojban has done a great job for getting rid of
ambiguity in orthography, phonology, and grammar. But as regards the
semantical part, I think there are some problems. As I said before, the
problem of ambiguity in semantics is very complex. Now, the problem I
perceive with lojban is that it gives fixed definitions for words (gismu), a
thing which is just oposed to the essence of semantics, since words are
understood by their use, and at the same time they are defined by their use,
so that the real meaning is the complex sum of all its everyday uses. A
dictionary only tries to approximate that, but it's always aimed to a person
that have already learned his vocabulary in a "natural" way. So, we have a
clear contradiction here: lojban, one the one hand, defines the gismu from
english words already in existence, which were and are used in this
"natural" way; and on the other, wants to "freeze" the meanings and create
new words out of them (lujvo), which are supposed to have a priori
definitions. As I suggested in my other mail, these definitions must be only
a hint, so as to let the word "start" and then, with its everyday use, get
really defined. But this is obviously not what lojban preaches, is it? So we
always get in trouble when we try to give a lujvo for a certain word,
because the definition must be contained by the word itself. In this way, it
will be never be possible to have complex concepts, since we would need
endless lujbos to define them.

mu'o

co'o mi'e. pablov