Subject: Re: [lojban] Beyond Whorf: "things," "qualities," and the origin of nouns and adjectives

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 02 Aug 2000 23:00:57 GMT

la ivAn cusku di'e

>Yes, Lojban does have a slant for arities greater than one.
>To my mind, however, the main thing is not the arity, but rather
>the ability of the word to be an argument, an attribute or a
>predicate; or if its ability is not an issue, then the likelihood
>of its being one of those things.

Its ability is obviously not an issue in Lojban, as brivla
can play all roles and it is not very difficult to make up
contexts where one could use any given brivla in any role.

As for likelihoods, the problem is how to determine to what
extent the likelihood is intrinsic to the concept and how much
of it is calqued from English and other languages, even the
English keyword used for the gismu can have a dominant effect.

>{le mlatu cu pinxe le ladru}
>sounds more plausible to me than {le xekri cu pinxe le blabi},
>although both may be equally unambiguous descriptions of the same
>situation.

Yes, to me too, but I'm not so sure what that says about
those concepts.

> > Right, but we don't have in Lojban a word for the vessel with
> > a narrow neck, the closest thing we have is a word for the
> > relationship that such vessels tend to have with other usually
> > liquid objects.
>
>Yes, -- and that is a rather unexpected state of affairs {sfofa}
>too could be a bin- (or more) -ary predicate (`x1 is a sofa sat on
>by x2 ...'), but it isn't. Nor is {dakfu} `... knife cutting x2'.
>Bottles seem to be singled out.

But {dakfu} is that, isn't it? Lojbab said that we should pay
no attention to the difference between "for contents", "with
contents", "containing", that exists in the gi'uste definitions
for different containers, they all should be taken as "containing",
so I assume that "for cutting" in {dakfu} should be taken as
just "cutting", too.

co'o mi'e xorxes

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