Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: zi'o & otpi

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2000 17:37:35 PDT

la rafael cusku di'e

>(Honestly, I feel that lojban here is constraining the way I'm thinking --
>it seemed obvious to me to be able to think about a "girzu be fi zi'o",
>even a "se gerku be zi'o", and all I'm hearing for several days now just
>states that it "cannot"... I just am more and more agreeing with the SWH!)

But Lojban is not constraining you. It is just that maybe {girzu}
is not the best word to express the particular relationship that
you are thinking of. For example, would you say that {lanme}
constrains you from considering {lanme be zi'o}? Some place
structures are just not defined for the concepts that we want
to use them for. We can either find other words to fit the concept,
like {anme}, or redefine the word to fit the concept (not so
easy in most cases).

>But let's go slightly offtopic.
>Actually, I am beginning to think that the whole issue is not about
>the ability of describing such or such concept, but about the way
>(western) people think and use description words to designate/name
>*objects*, rather than *relationships* (as does, apparently, lojban).

This certainly has a lot to do with it. I don't know if this is
a particularity of Westerners, but in any case Lojban does place
more emphasis on the relationships and we very easily forget
about it. We are used to the subject-predicate structure, and
Lojban is more like many different subjects at the same time
with one predicate.

>If using "zi'o" for x1 in a construct leads to obviously paradoxical
>meanings, or simply to concepts that are strictly logically nonsense, then
>it should mean that the very place structure itself is flawed, and not
>that the language user "should not" build such constructs.

Actually, my take tends to be the opposite. If using zi'o
on a place makes eminent sense, this is a good sign that the
place structure was too complicated to begin with and a simpler
place structure should have been preferred. But that's just
my impatience with difficult to learn place structures.

co'o mi'e xorxes

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