Subject: RE: [lojban] Re: Literal and Metaphor (was: pages)

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Aug 2001 07:22:18 +0100

Nick:
> Lojban doesn't do prototype semantics. More fool it, sure, but after all,
> we did sign on for a logical language. (This bears emphasising.) 

I remember you used to say this a lot in the years before you became
inactive. And as before, I don't really agree. Here are 3 things that
could count as prototype semantics.

1. Categories defined by criterial features, but speakers describe X
as belonging to category Y so long as X comes relevantly close to
belonging to category Y, even if X does not strictly speaking belong
to Y. Lojban can handle this. A logical language does not renounce
Gricean pragmatics.

2. Categories defined by prototypical member. There is no reason why
this can't happen in Lojban, for some or all predicates. The only
constraint is the nonnegotiability of place-structures (so however
typical a bottle this is, it's not a botpi if it is lidless).

3. Categories defined either way, but membership held to be a
gradient property. Various forms of fuzzy or gradient truth values
could handle this & it would probably be very Lojbanic.

> {botpi} (though I think the whole bottle-requires-lid thing is wrong ---

Someone or other, maybe Lojbab, pointed out that {botpi} means
"sealable container", rather than "bottle". As with "guitar"/{jgita},
keywords can be more of a hindrance than a help.

> That's one thing. The other thing is the issue of what do gismu mean. To
> me, if you have to use {zi'o}, that indicates something is wrong --- and
> likely, that you should be picking another gismu. 

But herein is part of the problem. People seem to feel the need to use
a gismu, even if there is no appropriate gismu, or even if the least
inappropriate gismu has the wrong place structure for one's needs. 
Better to say "pick another brivla".

--And.