la .lojbab. cu cusku di'e
selpa'i wrote:la .lojbab. cu cusku di'eIf I saw people making use of place structures in their brivla names, I might be more sympathetic. But they don't, and I suspect that absolutely no one thinks about the x2 of tsani when they use that as his name.Indeed, no one does, because {la} removes the meaning from the brivla so that only the string of letters/sounds is relevant. The form may hint at the original meaning of the brivla, but I doubt anyone thinks of a sky when they refer to {la tsani}, they think of *him*. I feel the same way about my own name. The name "selpa'i" is just a string of letters that I like the sound of. The meaning of the brivla is nice, but I would not claim that {mi selpa'i}, or in other words, I would not want people to infer {mi selpa'i} from {mi'e la selpa'i} or anything like that. And I wouldn't want to have to answer a question like "la selpa'i be ma". My name is not "selpa'i be <whatever>", it's "selpa'i".All of this sounds like a good reason to not merge cmene and brivla.
I don't follow.
>{zo X} means the *word* X, not its meaning.
>The place structure completely disappears.
But your name need not be marked with "la" or "zo", doi selpa'i (which
could be vocatively referring to someone with that name, or to someone
being affectionately called 'beloved' with an implicit x2, probably of
the speaker. When Marc Antony vocatively addresses "Friends, Romans,
countrymen" in Shakespeare, those are descriptions and not names and
would be brivla and not cmene.
That is why this ambiguity in gadri-less vocatives with brivla is not very popular (probably quite a minority view, in fact). To me, {COI/DOI broda} is always equivalent to {COI/DOI le broda}, and you have to use {la} explicitly to get {coi la broda}. There is just too big a difference between {la} and {lo/le} to have COI be ambiguous about it.
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