Subject: RE: [lojban] Three more issues

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 19:29:43 +0100

Avital:
> Issue A: (This is mainly for la xorxes.)
> Without using sets, how can "There are many rats" be said? (The book 
> says it as <le'i ratcu cu barda>

This means (in effect) "The rats are many (in number)", not "There are 
many rats". That wd be {so'u da ratcu} ["so'u" = "many", from memory: 
correct if necessary], which means (in effect) that the set of all 
rats has many members.

> Issue C:
> Since tanru are (very) semantically ambiguous, how can we allow 
> ourselves to define language concepts using tanru (e.g. <sumti tcita>, 
> <se steci srana>, etc? Those would mean extremely 'wide' concepts!

You're right, sort of. {sumti tcita} succeeds communicatively, because
although it expresses a wide concept, speakers have no trouble inferring
which narrow concept is intended. But the downside is that {sumti tcita}
becomes idiomatic and hence practically unusable to communicate the
wide concept or some different narrow subportion of it. Hence once
a particular tanru threatens to become idiomatic, one ought to lujvoize
it.

> Issue D:
> Why the hell does <brivla> mean what it means? How do the two terms 
> connect, and why would it mean only one word? What's the real 
> difference between a brivla and a selbri, then? I mean, <nu prenu kei> 
> is lo valsi, isn't it?

Yes, tho not pa valsi, of course. {brivla} means what it means because
the language/usage defines it thus. There's no obligation for the
lujvo sense to follow logically from its parts. Brivla is a class of
single words (ku'i cumki fa le nu mi srera). Selbri is a class of 
phrases (consisting of one or more words).

--And.