On 8/31/19 8:27 PM, Pierre Abbat wrote:
Indeed... I've remarked on this before. If knowing what a word means requires that the listener... well, be you, (since nobody else can deduce the meaning from the word), then how does that enable communication? And if it doesn't communicate, what linguistic purpose does it serve?On Saturday, 31 August 2019 08.59.10 EDT MorphemeAddict wrote:What's "tandala" based on? I get that it's defined in the text, but I can't find any term that would serve as the source of the Lojban word. What is "bakrto"?It's Swahili: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tandala . Lo bakrto is the ungulate called תאו in Hebrew, which is mentioned in Deut. 14:5. In modern Hebrew it is the buffalo, and different editions of the Reina- Valera and the LXX list the buffalo in this verse, but not all in the same position. How long ago did water buffaloes arrive in Egypt? Pierre
That's really the issue with fu'ivla in general, and especially with unmarked ones. Marking them with a rafsi (like bakrto) is at least a start, but in a case like this where the whole issue is _which_ specific bakni you are talking about, it doesn't do much.
I could maybe see an argument for default naming of animal/plant species by fu'ivla derived semi-obviously from their standard Linnean binomials (though even then it would be a pain for most people to look them up), since there is at least a standard. But when faced with a word whose source could literally be *any* language (that Pierre has heard of), and possibly even modified idiosyncratically (.alzaitu.? Well, stuck the al- article from Arabic to the Arabic word for olives (zayt) in order to get the consonant cluster. And how was I supposed to guess that?)
If you mean to say things to people, they need to have SOME way to work out what you said.
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