[lojban-beginners] Re: lujvo

Let's quote the complete context here:

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The relationship ``dog chases cat owned by daughter of person living in house'' is too distant, and too incidental, to be likely to need _expression_ as a single short word; the relationship ``dog lives in house'' is not. From all the various interpretations of ``gerku zdani'', the person creating ``gerzda'' should pick the most useful value of r. The most useful one is usually going to be the most obvious one, and the most obvious one is usually the closest one.

In fact, the relationship will almost always be so close that the predicate expressing r will be either the seltau or the tertau predicate itself. This should come as no surprise, given that a word like ``zdani'' in Lojban is a predicate. Predicates express relations; so when you're looking for a relation to tie together ``le zdani'' and ``le gerku'', the most obvious relation to pick is the very relation named by the tertau, ``zdani'': the relation between a home and its dweller. As a result, the object which fills the first place of ``gerku'' (the dog) also fills the second place of ``zdani'' (the house-dweller).

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SINCE we are picking the relationship of "dog lives in house" and we are focusing on the house, and we are NOT picking the relationship "dog is a home for…", THEREFORE, when we want to take about how something is a gerzda, we are talking about primarily a) a home and peripherally b) the thing that _dwells in_ that home. The context is saying we ARE picking a relationship….if you wanted to create a lujvo saying something is a white house, you would use the word labzda, and there, the x1 place would be the x1 of both the undering words, since it's something that is white and a house -- "(l1=z1) 1 is a white house for z2" If you wanted to created a word meaning a home for white things, you might still create the the word labzda, but then would define it as "z1 is a house for white things z2=l1" because now it is the inhabitants you want to focus on.

--gejyspa

From: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org [mailto:lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org] On Behalf Of Vid Sintef
Sent: Monday, June 18, 2007 10:26 AM
To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org
Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: lujvo

On 6/18/07, Turniansky, Michael [UNK] <MICHAEL.A.TURNIANSKY@saic.com> wrote:

[...] unlike tanru, a "lujvo, like other brivla, have a fixed place structure and a single meaning, encapsulating a commonly-used tanru into a lujvo relieves the listener of the burden of creative understanding" (12.1, second paragraph after example 1.2). In other words, once something is in a lujvo, it has only one meaning. That meaning is determined by the lujvo creator. So, you COULD have meant it to mean a "dog that houses fleas", but since the example we are creating is specifically not intended to convey that, we have already constrained what the relationship between the parts will be, and hence the place structure.

What is puzzling me is the part "As a result...". What result? It's saying as a matter of course that, if there's no particular purpose set by the creator, the object which fills the first place of "gerku" automatically fills the second, not first, place of "zdani". That's odd. What overlaps at the x1 of the combination "gerku" & "zdani" in the most unaffected/natural way (prior to the creator's intention to specify/determine the place structure as that which is of the most useful/common) should really be the x1 of "gerku" & the x1 of "zdani", shouldn't it?

--vid