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Re: [lojban-beginners] ma xe fanva zoigy.Dial 911.gy.
Using {klagau} (or as I would prefer it {klacpe}) is not quite as vague as the English "Call 911!", which could be intended to result in something other than them coming. I'll discuss this a bit later.
As for dialing numbers in general, yes, it has to do with pressing some buttons in some order, but that's very low-level a way to think about it. I suspect most people operate on a level higher than "pressing buttons in an order" when calling someone. When I call someone, I'm thinking of a number (actually a group of numbers, but how people group them differs between cultures and even intraculturally) that I identify with the callee. That being said, and disregarding this number grouping problem, we can just use {la'e li} to get to the person or institution associated with the number. After all, that is the very purpose of la'e.
Using {li} can lead to some abuse, as we must evaluate the _expression_ thereafter. Therefore, someone could write {.i ko klacpe la'e li sonono su'i papa} equivalently to {.i ko klacpe la'e li sopapa}. Furthermore, using {li} lends itself to problems when we're talking about dialing special numbers such as "*69" or other numbers involving special characters. Therefore, this suggests that {me'o} is indeed more appropriate, since it is the commonly used way to refer to a character string as such, rather than as the interpretation thereof. (The latter case being handled by {li} as shown above.) Therefore one should write {.i ko klacpe la'e me'o sopapa}.
Still, there's the issue of {klacpe} not being adequately vague to translate the English. Of course, we might just not care about vagueness here, and I for one would most often be content with just saying {.i ko klacpe la'e me'o sopapa} when emergencies occur. However, the focus of the English is not so much on the summoning of the police or emergency services, but rather on contacting them, the result of which is left to context or is unimportant. For this, I have no objections to {jorne}. Although it does seem metaphorical at first, we can see that the physical case is really just a special case of the so-called metaphorical one. As such, the reading I have of the definition of {jorne} is "jorne = x1 is in contact with/connected to x2 by x3." Gismu should be broad, and it would thus feel unlojbanic to me for us to arbitrarily restrict jorne to physical cases only, especially in the face of having no other adequate way of expressing the nonphysical cases.
All in all, I would write {.i ko jorne la'e me'o sopapa}.
.i mi'e la tsani mu'o
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