Re: TECH: se, te, & lujvo

[And Rosta as a <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>]

> 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.

Two electric appliances are plugged into the wall. One of them often emits
sparks; I and my wife both know this. I say: "unplug the spark plug".

This means 'unplug the plug associated with a spark'. If I'd said "unplug
the sparkplug" (i.e. lujvo rather than tanru), & English were like Lojban
in not allowing one dictionary word (=brivla?) to have more than one meaning,
then my utterance could not have meant literally 'unplug the plug
associated with a spark'.

> 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.

This example is not good for your argument, since when a tanru the primary
stress is on FA (because _grand_ is an adjective), and when a lujvo the
primary stress is on GRAND. Cf. _greenhouse : green house_, _blackboard :
black board_.

> 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.

If I want to talk about a whale that is blue, I can. The confusion is that
English, unlike Lojban, does not always distinguish morphologically
between tanru and lujvo. In lojban if I wanted to talk about the species
blue whale I would obviously use a lujvo (or lehavla, but not a tanru),
& if talking about a whale that is blue I would use a tanru.

I really cannot believe I am saying anything controversial here.

Now, to return to my original question, which I will now answer.
I now reckon, as a result of all
this discussion, that semantically _se jerna_ and _seljerna_ are equivalent,
and that the unpredictable meaning of most lujvo comes from their being
derived from tanru, not from their being lujvo. In this case, there is no
place for _seljerna_ in the dictionary, and _seljerna_ is merely a
stylistic variant of _se jerna_.

----
And.