X-Digest-Num: 133 Message-ID: <44114.133.812.959273824@eGroups.com> Date: Fri, 07 May 1999 18:07:47 -0700 From: Ivan A Derzhanski Subject: Re: pamoi xatra X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 812 Content-Length: 1345 Lines: 34 I'm too busy to follow this discussion as closely as I might have liked, but here's ma pennyworth. ... Robin Turner wrote: [re {mi ctuca mi}] > I'd use {cilre} or {tadni} rather than {ctuca} - "teach > yourself" is really an English idiom which doesn't go > that well into Lojban, I think (I don't know if there's > a Russian equivalent). It works better in English than in Russian. I wouldn't call it an idiom, though -- _teach oneself_ does mean something that _study on one's own_ doesn't, so {ctuca} with x1=x2 makes perfect sense to me, under the assumption that {ctuca}, as its conventional English counterpart, implies performing a very specific teaching process of which the recipient can exceptionally (!) be the same person as the agent. In that sense the natlangs that use a causative of `study' or `learn' for `teach' are being rather imprecise -- a parent can cause a child to study/learn his lesson by various methods, but that's not the same thing as teaching. -- `Zhi1 ren2 zhe3 zhi4, zi4 zhi1 zhe3 ming2. (Lao2zi, _DDJ_: Sheng4 ren2 zhe3 you3 li4, zi4 sheng4 zhe3 qiang2.' di4 33 zhang1) Ivan A Derzhanski H: cplx Iztok bl 91, 1113 Sofia, Bulgaria W: Dept for Math Lx, Inst for Maths & CompSci, Bulg Acad of Sciences