[lojban-beginners] Re: PLace structure vs. cmavo?

["Brett Williams" <mungojelly@gmail.com>]

On 9/14/08, Tom Gysel <to_mu1975@yahoo.com> wrote:

And 'place structure': is it really more simple than using a cmavo for 'to', 'from', 'by', ...etc? There's a lot of cmavo anyway in lojban, why couldn't we use them, instead of place structure? Is memorizing 'place structures' not much harder? (or maybe it is not that hard? I haven't got a good overview in my mind of all the kinds of place structures there could be in gismu)

I wasn't around when the structures were made, so I can't tell you why they're that way.  But they do make sense to me.  You have to have some basic semantic space somewhere-- you can indicate what a place means with BAI or "fi'o", but those still depend fundamentally on the semantics of particular gismu places.  ("mi cadzu se ka'a le purdi", I walk with destination the garden-- the BAI "se ka'a" is just as vague about what a selklama is as the gismu itself.)  Packing those semantic spaces together into five place gismu is arguably excessive, but it seems to work OK. 
  
Think about it this way: The numbered places are very strongly colored by each gismu that they appear in, so that it's hard to say that an x2 place means anything in particular at all.  That means that the numbered places are very generic, and so it's not unlojbanic how variable their meanings are.  If instead we had prepositions like "from", which also were colored by the gismu they related to (in a klama situation the "from" is the terklama, and in a benji situation the "from" is the velbenji, etc), then those prepositions would have a semantic suggestiveness, but not a semantic clarity.  Their meaning would be very dependent on context.  The meaning of fa/fe/fi/fo/fu is even more determined by context, of course, but it's SO determined by context that it becomes purely structural. 
 
mu'o mi'e se ckiku