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[lojban] Re: ki'a



Yanis Batura wrote:
On 20.11.2006, 6:48, Bob LeChevalier wrote:
Yanis Batura wrote:

{pinpedi} is a stage 4 fu'ivla, like {djirafa}, {alga}, {caxmati} etc.


And is an example of why I am opposed to inventing stage 4 fu'ivla at this point in the language evolution - as we can see, no one has any idea what it means. A fu'ivla should remain a Type III - marked by a semantic-hint rafsi - until its usage is so common that usage (and/or Zipf's law) indicates a need for a shorter form. I don't think that any
fu'ivla has received such usage.


There are only 1342 semantic hint classes.

Most natural languages using a semantic classifier system have a couple orders of magnitude fewer classes (they are commonly called "genders", Swahili has 14, and Russian has only 3), and they work anyway.

So, if we want to fu'ivlize
games like "Go" we will have to stick to {kelcr-}: {kelcrgo}. One
might then wonder what type of PLAYER Go is.

1. semantic classes are not tertanru. There is no requirement that XXX as a semantic class means that the fu'ivla is a kind of XXX. Rather it is an attempt to limit the semantic space one must consider in guessing the meaning of an unknown (and probably undefined) word borrowed from another language. Of course if it happens to be a suitable tertanru for a tanru expressing the concept, this can be a good thing in that the sentence might make some sense using the semantic classifier in place of the unknown fu'ivla as a rough approximation. But I contend that making such an assumption is extremely risky since non-x1 places of the fu'ivla almost certainly would NOT match that of the classifier, even if the x1 would.

2. Since the place structure of kelcrgo would not be intuitively obvious in any event, maybe it should be OK if someone were to presume from a case tag "kelcr" that the place structure of kelcrgo is "x1 plays Go with x2 (with possible other places like board size and ruleset in addition). There is of course no rule saying this has to be the case, but it counters the argument about what one might "wonder".

3. brivla express a predicate relationship which is not limited to the x1 place, and kelci as a semantic classifier can refer to any of the places of kelci as well as nu kelci, ka kelci, etc.

4. Incidentally, I suggest that one could also use jivna or zdile as semantic tags for the game of Go, depending on what they wish to communicate about the game.

lojbab



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