From lojbab@lojban.org Thu Oct 04 08:08:16 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: lojbab@lojban.org X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_4_1); 4 Oct 2001 15:05:55 -0000 Received: (qmail 26472 invoked from network); 4 Oct 2001 15:05:55 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by 10.1.1.220 with QMQP; 4 Oct 2001 15:05:55 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO stmpy-1.cais.net) (205.252.14.71) by mta1 with SMTP; 4 Oct 2001 15:08:15 -0000 Received: from bob.lojban.org (187.dynamic.cais.com [207.226.56.187]) by stmpy-1.cais.net (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id f94F8C755224 for ; Thu, 4 Oct 2001 11:08:13 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <4.3.2.7.2.20011003213512.00dd18c0@pop.cais.com> X-Sender: vir1036@pop.cais.com X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 4.3.2 Date: Wed, 03 Oct 2001 21:58:02 -0400 To: Subject: Re: [lojban] spatnrosace In-Reply-To: <0110021102160C.29287@neofelis> References: <01100121050807.29287@neofelis> <01100121050807.29287@neofelis> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" At 11:02 AM 10/2/01 -0400, Pierre Abbat wrote: >Found a website >(http://www.life.uiuc.edu/plantbio/260/Rosaceae/Rosehome.html) that explains >it. There are four subfamilies: >Spiraeoidae: Spiraea trees >Rosoidae: rozgu, fragari, frambesi >Amygdaloidae: mugdali, persika, rutrprunu >Maloidea: plise, perli, krataigo >How do we distinguish plums in particular from all the members of the genus >Prunus? This presumes that there is a distinction. My dictionary (Webster's New World College Edition) says that a plum is the fruit of any tree in Prunus. It also presumes that you NEED to make a distinction, which is the problem I have with all your word-coining - it is occurring in the absence of usage that suggests when and whether one would care to make the distinctions, which in turn would determine what the appropriate words would be. ALL of the above are "rozgu" in the broad sense. In a narrower sense, the rosoidae are rozgu, and in the narrowest sense a particular species or group thereof may be rozgu. It all depends on what I am trying to say about rozgu. Certainly if I am talking about the flowers growing in my backyard, I will probably be referring to the narrowest sense of rozgu. But I don't need a word that denotes the species any more than English does. I can say "rozgu" and just like English "rose" we will determine from context whether it is the garden flower, the genus, or the family. There is no need to learn a zillion fu'ivla (type IV nonetheless and therefore meaningless to any other person who hasn't memorized the same list as you) to make the distinctions that people want to make in everyday speech. For the distinctions used in scientific discussions, the proper approach is the one that English scientists use along with most others in the world: type I fu'ivla "la'o spat. Spiraeoidae spat." la'o was put into the language specifically to avoid the need to solve the unsolvable Linnean binomial problem. (If some particular species are being used a lot in a paper or in a particular lab environment, the appropriate solution is to use names - type 2 fu'ivla or any of the anaphoric solutions. Type 3 fu'ivla are used when jargon is common enough to pass between fields and there is risk that two different jargon-using groups will fail to understand each other. Type 4 fu'ivla make sense only when a word is being used so often that it will be the sort of word that non-technical people would be expected to know and identify without context. >By the way, one of the species is Fragaria ananassa, which sounds like it >means "a pineapple type of strawberry". Probably that is what was intended by the namer, too. lojbab -- lojbab lojbab@lojban.org Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org