Subject: Re: [lojban] spatnrosace

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Oct 2001 21:58:02 -0400

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 [email-masked]
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