Subject: Re: [lojban] force and pressure

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 30 Jul 2000 02:02:31 -0400

At 07:06 PM 07/29/2000 -0400, Pierre Abbat wrote:
> >What about units like the Newton? I remember we discussed this
> >before. One possibility was to make it up from kg.m/s2, but that
> >gets ugly very soon. The other way is of course fu'ivla, so
> >I would say {klanrniutoni}, {klanrpaskali}, {klanrvolti}, and
> >so on. Not very pretty, but better than lujvo.
>
>Why do fu'ivla have to be based on a gismu? I think it makes sense when
>distinguishing between kulnrfarsi and bangrfarsi, or between tricrplumu and
>grutrplumu. But for words that mean only one thing, I don't see the point. I
>think we should use other parts of fu'ivla space.

Jorge gave a good answer, but the additional answer is that sooner or later 
there WILL be Type 4 fu'ivla, which are the ones that have no gismu 
prefix. As Jorge said, they are hard to verify that they are validly made, 
and furthermore it is hard to decide that we have an instance where there 
is such a "single meaning" (very few words in natural language are truly 
so narrow in meaning that they can be called monosemous - most are 
scientific jargon terms, and they make up for being singular in meaning by 
being obscure to anyone not familiar with the field where they are 
used. After all, how many people on the street will even know that 4 
pascals are a measurement and not a family? In Lojban you could tell they 
weren't a family because they aren't cmene, but you would not know that a 
pascal is a unit. Given the other thread where people are talking about 
the unpredictability of place structures, it seems rather useful to have 
the klanr- prefix that will suggest a certain kind of place structure.)

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