Subject: Re: [lojban] Digest Number 497

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2000 04:20:48 -0400

At 05:41 PM 06/27/2000 -0400, [email-masked] wrote:
>In a message dated 00-06-27 16:19:15 EDT, cowan writes:
>
><< But "botpi" doesn't mean "bottle", the noun; it means "to bottle", the
>verb.
> >>
>botpi bot bo'i bottle x1 is a
>bottle/jar/urn/flask/closable container
>for x2, made of material x3 with lid x4 1f 79 (cf. baktu, lante,
>patxu, tansi, tanxe,
>vasru, gacri)

If the quote is intended to serve to argue against the verb vs. noun 
statement by Cowan, I refer back to my post representing Nora, that all 
main selbri in sentences should be understood in English as verbs.

As to whether a bottle is a bottle regardless of what it contains or 
whether it contains anything, that is precisely the question for Lojban: is 
this true for "lo caca'a botpi" (a present, actual, bottle) in the same way 
it is for "a bottle". I contend that even for English the question is 
somewhat murky. Most people would probably think to build a tanru for 
"vase" off of "bucket" (baktu) or cup (kabri) or pot (patxu), because the 
essence of a vase for flowers is that they stick out the top. But what 
happens when you use an old wine bottle to put a long stem rose in, 
something I have seen done many a time. In Lojban that is not "lo botpi be 
lo rozgu", you are using something shaped like a bottle NOT as a closable 
container, but as a simple deep container (lo patxu be lo rozgu), and the 
fact that it is long and slender is something you might add as an adjective 
build into patxu based lujvo for a bud vase (there is nothing in Lojban 
that says a botpi has to be long and slender either, a gasoline tank and 
indeed a large city water storage tank are both kinds of botpi per the 
definition). Lojban clearly has divided up the semantic space of 
containers a bit differently than English has, a bit more systematically 
(which does not really mean that it is more "logically") and you have to 
think about what the words mean before choosing one.

But all this is apart from the question of whether something can be a 
container of any kind if it has no contents. Nora and I essentially were 
saying that almost anything concave is potentially a container of some kind 
based on shape (limited only by the ability to orient it to make use of 
gravity), but we hardly wish to extend the realm of containers to include 
every concave object in the universe. Thus the essence of containerdom 
must be actual contents, either at present or perhaps by design (which 
is probably why I sometimes used the preposition "for" for the x2 place), 
and tying containers to the realm of Lojban tools (tutci), those things 
used whose form determines their function.

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