Subject: Re: [lojban] Retraction, Part 1

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2001 22:37:10

la pier cusku di'e

>jipci tarmi isn't right either; it's the shape of a chicken, not something
>shaped like a chicken, which is jipci seltai or jipci tamsmi.

That's right if you stick to the place structures as presented in
the gismu list. I find that {tarmi} and {skari} are much more useful
if taken to mean "x1 is of the shape of x2" and "x1 is of the color
of x2". Otherwise I don't know what to put in the x1 of the gismu.
In the rare cases when you want to talk of the abstract shape or
color, they're {ka ce'u tarmi makau} and {ka ce'u skari makau},
or {kamtai} and {kamska} for short.

In the case of {junta} it doesn't matter much that it got a weird
x1 because it didn't displace any other meaning, but in the case
of {tarmi} and {skari}, wasting the gismu for the abstract property
is a shame. How do you say "sky coloured" or "chicken shaped".
{seltai} doesn't help, {seltai be ma pe lo'e jipci}. {tamsmi} and
{skasmi} would work, but that means we would lose the advantage
of having the short rafsi -ska and -tai with useful meanings,
so that we can have for example {tanska} for sky-coloured instead
of {tanskasmi}.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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