Thanks Brett,
Do you (or anyone else) know if there is a way of classifying gismu, as in:
these types of gismu have this kind of place structure, and this sort has this
structure... ? To memorize them with much more ease?
Thank you,
Tom
--- On Sun, 9/14/08, Brett Williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
From: Brett Williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: PLace structure vs. cmavo?
To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org
Date: Sunday, September 14, 2008, 8:58 PM
On 9/14/08, Tom Gysel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
And 'place structure': is it really more simple than using a cmavo for 'to',
'from', 'by', ...etc? There's a lot of cmavo anyway in lojban, why couldn't we
use them, instead of place structure? Is memorizing 'place structures' not much
harder? (or maybe it is not that hard? I haven't got a good overview in my mind
of all the kinds of place structures there could be in gismu)
I wasn't around when the structures were made, so I can't tell you why they're
that way. But they do make sense to me. You have to have some basic semantic
space somewhere-- you can indicate what a place means with BAI or "fi'o", but
those still depend fundamentally on the semantics of particular gismu places.
("mi cadzu se ka'a le purdi", I walk with destination the garden-- the BAI "se
ka'a" is just as vague about what a selklama is as the gismu
itself.) Packing those semantic spaces together into five place
gismu is arguably excessive, but it seems to work OK.
Think about it this way: The numbered places are very strongly colored by each
gismu that they appear in, so that it's hard to say that an x2 place means
anything in particular at all. That means that the numbered places are very
generic, and so it's not unlojbanic how variable their meanings are. If
instead we had prepositions like "from", which also were colored by the gismu
they related to (in a klama situation the "from" is the terklama, and in a
benji situation the "from" is the velbenji, etc), then those prepositions would
have a semantic suggestiveness, but not a semantic clarity. Their meaning
would be very dependent on context. The meaning of fa/fe/fi/fo/fu is even more
determined by context, of course, but it's SO determined by context that it
becomes purely structural.
mu'o mi'e se ckiku
