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Re: [lojban-beginners] precise tenru

On 26 September 2014 09:15, TR NS <transfire@gmail.com> wrote:
On Friday, September 26, 2014 6:57:41 AM UTC-4, tsani wrote:
That's the beauty of it. You could mean almost anything with it, and due to that you mean next to nothing. Context is paramount in interpreting these kinds of tanru. Naturally, the more selbri you expect the listener to infer, the less likely it is that what you mean to say and what the listener interprets will be alike. This is one of those very vague features of Lojban, like {zo'e} or {co'e}, and I hardly see people pointing out that they're impossible to use conversationally. Theoretically, you could mean anything, but in practice, you don't.
 

I'm not sure I think it beautiful. It means it's just a matter of convention, and not in any way logical. Someone could coin a phrase "melbi bebna" and an outsider might think it meant rather literally "a beautiful fool" (using the simplest x1=y1 rule), but by the convention it actually means "ugly" --the person is a fool b/c they just think they look beautiful.

Ultimately tanru would become a proverbial garden of idiom.

Tanru are simple, and less verbose constructs are typically less precise. Tanru are designed to be inexact in their meaning, and are designed to be highly dependent on context. If you don't like that, then don't use tanru; if you want to be precise, there're a multitude of alternatives.

.i mi'e la tsani mu'o 

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