[lojban-beginners] Re: A question about gismu definitions

[Christopher Doty <suomichris@gmail.com>]

I was just looking though the jbovlaste, and it looks like definitions
get proposed and voted on by the community?  Maybe this is why the
definitions seem a bit weird to me...  I had previously thought that,
as with the grammar and gismu themselves, they were a sort of
pre-defined set and not so flexible. Am I understanding this process
right? Namely, that I should be flexible in understanding the
definitions because they come from different people, and aren't writ
in stone?

Which brings me to another question:

cpina	 - x1 is pungent/piquant/peppery/spicy/irritating to sense x2

It seems odd to me to have "irritating" in this definition, since it
presumes that something spicy or peppery is bad.  Wouldn't this sort
of opinion about good or bad be better done with attitudinals?

.ii le cidja cpina
'Yikes, the food is spicy!'

.ui le cidja cpina
'Yay, the food is spicy!'

With irritating in this definition, the last one seems to be more like
"I'm happy that this food is irritating," which seems an odd thing to
say..

Am I missing something here?

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 05:45, Oleksii Melnyk <lamelnyk@gmail.com> wrote:
> You don't need to wait. "remna jenai prenu" is quite common (dead
> humans). "prenu ju remna" is rarely distinct, but the difference is
> obvious at the start of the Turing test, when you don't know, who is
> who. And here are a lot of "us", believing/thinking, that "we" are not
> "remna", but some parasites, utilising human bodies — be it "soul"
> from a lot of religions, "memes" from Dawkins books. So, we do need
> both words right now.

Well, I guess if we want to have both things, we run into the problem
of making some potentially political decisions.  For example, we could
take a hint from Klingon, and say that "person" means a being capable
of using language; but then it becomes self-defining that, in lojban,
great apes are "people."  I suppose this is why defining person is
such a philosophical question--it just ain't easy!