Semantics

["61510::GILSON" <cbmvax!uunet!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!gilson!61510.decnet>]

And Rosta <ucleaar%UCL.AC.UK@CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU> writes:

>Prescriptiveness and ambiguity are not mutually exclusive. The semantics
>will inevitably involve a certain degree of vagueness (which I take to
>be equivalent to ambiguity in your usage). My point was that the (lexical)
>semantics could be much less vague than it is. Specifically, it could
>be stated what the prototypical instance of each category is, and what
>its particularly salient features are.

>For example, is a _mruli_ ('hammer, weighted stick tool used for unspecified
>purpose') typically used for hitting? If one uses a weighted stick tool
>for some other purpose, e.g. raking leaves, is it a _mruli_ or should
>some other word be sought? Could one call an instrument used for
>hitting a _mruli_ even if it isn't a weighted stick, or should one
>seek another word to avoid being misunderstood. Is a bottle more of
>a botpi than a cup? A bowl? A chalice? An amphora?

>Sufficient usage might indeed resolve these questions, but it could
>take a lot of usage, and also a lot of research to discover what
>senses usage has fixed on. Set against this, the labour of *stipulating*
>the prototype for each gismu actually seems *less* than the labour eventually
>involved if we wait for usage to decide matters.

>My Lojban compositions were parasitic on the lexical semantics of the
>English keywords given in the Lojban gismu lists. Imagine someone
>without a good command of English composing in Lojban using a gismu
>list with keywords in their native language (preferably something non-
>European). To what extent would we be able to understand each other?
>Not so well, I hazard.

This is not specific to Lojban. _Any_ conlang is going to have this problem.
English uses the word "water" to denote at least two things:
1. A chemical substance that could be more systematically designated as
   "dihydrogen oxide," and
2. The substance referred to in 1. when in its liquid form.

I do not know if any conlang up to now distinguishes them (Language X will,
if I get my way, which I think will be the case) but neither of these meanings
quite corresponds to that of Japanese "mizu," which often is glossed as "water"
in translations. "Mizu" in fact, is best translated "cold water," though most
times when one sees "mizu," in fact, it would do no harm to translate it as
just "water" because the relevance of its temperature is not there. The point is
that, if a Lojban, Esperanto, etc. word is glossed as "mizu" in Japanese, he
will look in vain for another word to mean "yu" (= hot water) which to him is
as different from "mizu" as "steam" is from "water" in English. Since the over-
whelming majority of Lojban users are native speakers of English, I suspect
that most of them do not even realize when they may be defining a word in a
way that will cause trouble, even given the existence of the concept of
"malglico."

Given Loglan's origin in SWH speculations, it is probably more imperative that
Lojban semantics devisors be aware of these problems than it is for people
working on other conlangs. But this is really a point for _all_ language con-
structors to wory about.

                                                Bruce