Re: TECH: se, te, & lujvo

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@GREBYN.COM>]

The problem is that I cannot for the life of me think of a reason why someone
would use the 'tanru' to mean anything other than the lujvo.  Maybe it has
been so used, but not to my knowledge.  The process of making a word into a
lujvo vs. leaving it as a tanru in English is rather haphazard, since it is
probabaly laypeople that do the merging (no doubt one of the inventors or
early advancers of the sparkplug first wrote it as a single word).  The are
many English words that are still technically written as tanru, but which
have a much more restricted meaning than the tanru technically has.  Now you
can say that someone could use such a tanru, as they could use "spark plug",
in some way OTHER than the lujvo meaning, but only if there was strong
context to support the different interpretation would people find it
understandable as something else.  If I were to walk up to someone and call t
them a "grand father", they would certainly presume that I meant the lujvo
unless I strongly accented the separation of the two words.  But I doubt that
anyone would presume that a "killer whale" or a "blue whale" is anything other
than the particular species that are so labelled, that a rusty can in the trash
could be called a "garbage can" (tghough the tanru is valid), etc.

lojbab