Subject: Re: [lojban] spatnrosace

From: Pierre Abbat <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2001 19:48:43 -0400

On Wednesday 03 October 2001 21:58, Bob LeChevalier (lojbab) wrote:
> At 11:02 AM 10/2/01 -0400, Pierre Abbat wrote:
> 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.

To me, even though the word "plum" is from "Prunus", peaches, nectarines, 
apricots, and cherries are not plums. If someone uses the word to refer to 
the whole genus, I will be confused at first. If he uses it to mean both the 
genus and the species, I will probably reply with a Japanese battologism.

> 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.

Which most of these are. A non-technical person knows a rose, a strawberry, a 
raspberry, and a peach, but probably has no idea that they belong to the same 
family. I didn't until I read that page. He knows a peach, a plum, a cherry, 
an apricot, and an almond, and probably recognizes that they are similar.

{la'o spat. Spiraeoideae .spat} refers to the subfamily, not to any plant in 
it. To refer to a plant in it, I could say {lo rozgu be la'o spat. 
Spiraeoideae .spat}, which also indicates that I'm brasmu using {rozgu}. 
Likewise {lo fragari be la'o ly. ananassa .ly}.

phma