Subject: RE: [lojban] dictionary - which words?

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 01 Sep 2002 06:09:48 +0000

la lojbab cusku di'e

>So for you the definition of mau includes all the possible definitions of X
>+ mau and for mau + Y for arbitrary X or Y.

No, I don't think it includes any of those. The semantics of
the word {mau} involves the full relationship {zmadu}, that is
all I said. You don't really know what {mau} means if you don't
know the full {zmadu} place structure.

>Most people would think that the definition of mau is that of mau by
>itself; that the meaning changes in a phrase means that they should be told
>to look up the phrase.

But the meaning does not change in a phrase. The word {mau} has
the same meaning in all contexts, just as the predicate word {zmadu}
has the same meaning in all contexts.

>"mau" by itself does NOT access all the places of "zmadu". If we are going
>to list the meaning of "se mau" under "mau", why aren't we listing it under
>"se". The 2nd place of zmadu is no more a part of the definition of mau
>than it is part of the definition of "se".

That's not true, {mau} always expresses at least a two-place
relationship, and in fact always a three-place relationship
unless you don't agree that {mau} means {fi'o zmadu}. That only
one of the places is "accessed" does not mean that the others
are not part of its meaning.

>(I'm being a devil's advocate here - in some ways you are correct, but that
>would be a lot of manual work or some pretty hairy software to figure out
>exactly what headword to list which word combinations under, and then
>combine the text in some logical and well-formatted manner.)

That's a totally different discussion. But I don't see that the
problem is any different than for gismu, which also can have
several different English words corresponding to their different
places.

Which combination do you consider would be hard to decide where
to list?

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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