At 05:41 PM 06/27/2000 -0400, pycyn@aol.com wrote:
In a message dated 00-06-27 16:19:15 EDT, cowan writes: << But "botpi" doesn't mean "bottle", the noun; it means "to bottle", the verb. >> botpi bot bo'i bottle x1 is a bottle/jar/urn/flask/closable container for x2, made of material x3 with lid x4 1f 79 (cf. baktu, lante, patxu, tansi, tanxe, vasru, gacri)
If the quote is intended to serve to argue against the verb vs. noun statement by Cowan, I refer back to my post representing Nora, that all main selbri in sentences should be understood in English as verbs.
As to whether a bottle is a bottle regardless of what it contains or whether it contains anything, that is precisely the question for Lojban: is this true for "lo caca'a botpi" (a present, actual, bottle) in the same way it is for "a bottle". I contend that even for English the question is somewhat murky. Most people would probably think to build a tanru for "vase" off of "bucket" (baktu) or cup (kabri) or pot (patxu), because the essence of a vase for flowers is that they stick out the top. But what happens when you use an old wine bottle to put a long stem rose in, something I have seen done many a time. In Lojban that is not "lo botpi be lo rozgu", you are using something shaped like a bottle NOT as a closable container, but as a simple deep container (lo patxu be lo rozgu), and the fact that it is long and slender is something you might add as an adjective build into patxu based lujvo for a bud vase (there is nothing in Lojban that says a botpi has to be long and slender either, a gasoline tank and indeed a large city water storage tank are both kinds of botpi per the definition). Lojban clearly has divided up the semantic space of containers a bit differently than English has, a bit more systematically (which does not really mean that it is more "logically") and you have to think about what the words mean before choosing one.
But all this is apart from the question of whether something can be a container of any kind if it has no contents. Nora and I essentially were saying that almost anything concave is potentially a container of some kind based on shape (limited only by the ability to orient it to make use of gravity), but we hardly wish to extend the realm of containers to include every concave object in the universe. Thus the essence of containerdom must be actual contents, either at present or perhaps by design (which is probably why I sometimes used the preposition "for" for the x2 place), and tying containers to the realm of Lojban tools (tutci), those things used whose form determines their function.
lojbab -- lojbab lojbab@lojban.org Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org