Re: semantics ...

[John Minot <minots@texas.net>]

la lojbab pu benji
> But not all do this. Thus my sister-in-law, an artist and serious nature
> lover, seems to attribute to "animal" the exclusion of birds (this led to
> an awkward semantics argument one day).  It might be for her that "animal"
> is synonymous with "mammal" or even with "beast" (I never thought to ask
> her whether a lizard or a bat was an "animal".)

On this subject, you might want to look at the Cambridge Encyclopedia of
Language (u'ucai, I don't have it with me and can't find the page
number).  It had a small box discussing the curiousity in English of
multiple meanings of the word 'animal' (in nonscientific discourse, of
course).  It showed a chart something like this:

Plants			Animals
			/     \
	      Non-mammals     Animals
			      /     \
	                 Humans     Animals


co'o be'i la djan maynat