Subject: Re: [lojban] spatnrosace

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 05 Oct 2001 09:42:14 -0400

At 07:48 PM 10/4/01 -0400, Pierre Abbat wrote:
>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.

I'm sure. The same for me; I was surprised when I looked it up.

>If someone uses the word to refer to
>the whole genus, I will be confused at first.

I would presume that one would use prune/prunus for the genus.

>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.

A non-technical *English-speaker* perhaps, and maybe only one of those from 
the US or UK, since probably some of these are as exotic in Australia and 
New Zealand as kiwi is in this country.

But what fruit distinctions and similarities do Chinese and Hindi and 
Arabic natives make? I never checked, and I suspect that you haven't either.

I put rozgu in the language because not only is the flower much recognized 
in many cultures, but I DID realize that the rose family included a lot of 
different common plants. Didn't and still don't really know what they are, 
but I knew it would be a useful tanru building block.

>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.

Well, I don't know about almonds, which I thought were nuts, but the rest 
are an edible fruit with a single seed in the middle.

>{la'o spat. Spiraeoideae .spat} refers to the subfamily, not to any plant in
>it.

It's a name. It refers to anything we want to use that name for. I don't 
see why it cannot refer to a plant in the family any more than a fu'ivla 
would. The key point of the hierarchy of fu'ivla is the recognition that 
most of them are indeed nothing more than names. While you can attribute 
the generic style of plant/animal place structure to them, the decision as 
to what things warrant different names is purely arbitrary, in this case 
decided by biologists, in the case of foods decided by chefs.

When I was in college, the biology teacher would talk about acer or acer 
secorum expecting us to know that these were maples/sugar maples. he waas 
talking about the trees and not the classification slots.

>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}.

If you use the former, I would know you are talking about some kind of 
plant related to a rose (not having any idea what a spiraeoideae is). In 
the case of the latter, I would have no idea what you were referring to 
because fragari tells me nothing Lojbanically. It is no more meaningful to 
me than spiraeoideae or ananassa (the latter means something to me once I 
realize it is a fruit because I know some Russian, but as a type of 
fragari, whatever that is, it means nothing).

You seem to be trying to add type IV fu'ivla with the idea that everyday 
people will learn these as often and as easily as they learn gismu. If 
they don't, you gain nothing by making them type IV over type I-III.

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