Well, you can't be ambiguous in one sense (the one I take you to mean), because Lojban has default grouping to the right, so XYZ is automatically X(YZ), so If you want to say something that might be either "a pretty school for girls" and "a school for pretty girls", you can't, officially. You have, unofficially, two outs. 1) The nature of the bond between modifier and modified is unspecified, so it can almost as easily be that X characterizes all the Y in Z as X characterizes Z (insofar as) containing Y. 2) People are sloppy, even in logic, so XYZ may be understood, despite what is said, as (XY)Z, based on context or inflection or whatever. So the unmarked form is at least pragmatically ambiguous (standard logic game: until we have a thoroughly developed pragmatics, we can push all our problem case off on it, cf. God).
From: Escape Landsome <escaaape@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Saturday, March 17, 2012 9:04 AM
Subject: [lojban] Equivocal tanru
I asked some question which was not understood, so I ask it anew :
a tanru X Y is some Y that has X-ness. it is not "X and Y" (unless
we play with the predicativity of X and Y), rather it is one Y, but
with X semantic coloration.
If I want to speak about a X Y Z, that is, either a Z which is
somewhat like a X Y (in the tanru sense above), or a Y Z that is like
a X, --- but keeping myself deliberately equivocal, how do I proceed ?
The way Lojban does seems to compel me to disambiguate, but what if I
WANT TO REMAIN AMBIGUOUS ?
How do I say "little girls' school" in lojban WHEN I WANT TO REMAIN AMBIGUOUS ?
--
Please consider not this as a mere amusement of myself... If we want
to translate old books of yore in Lojban, we'll have to remain
equivocal with some "X's Y's Z" phrases, BECAUSE the books in which
they are written are equivocal themselves (and we ought not to
desambiguate things that are ambiguous).
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