pe'a/po'a; clarifying what John says

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

John said something glibly that will be misinterpreted, especially by And,
I'm afraid.
>tanru mean whatever the speaker wants

This isn't quite true.  They mean what ever the speaker wants, constrained by
the fact that the place structure of this tanru is that of the final term.
What is unconstrined, is the nature of how the first term is taken to modify
the second.  Thus risni jelca MUST be something burning, i.e. being
consumed via chemical reaction in an atmosphere (or however the place structure
goes).  Exactly what the heart has to do with it is uncertain.

Given this constraint, the nature of the lujvo risnyjelca is much clearer.
It means some one specific meaning, from among those that moght be
interpreted for the tanru, most likely the 'most-useful one', however that may
be evaluated.  For nonce use, this means 'whatever the speaker decides'.  For
adding such a word to the dictionary, we at least in theory have to be prepared
to override someones nonce usage because we see a more obvious interpretation
for a lujvo.

It is not MANDATORY that a lujvo be selected from among the tanru meanings,
but it is a strong norm.  The animals discussion ongoing shows an area
where  brodybrode may not be one of the options for broda brode, but is
instead somewhat orthogonal.  "le'avla", which is short for the tanru
se lebna tavla, has dropped the 'se', which is a little less according to the
norms, but allowed when the word is common enough to suggest that Zipf
should override the norm, AND the shorter word has no obvious other use.

This latter course is most likely when the cmavo being deleted so not cause
too much misleading to the listener who doesn't yet know the word (and there
is always a time when you don't know a word, if only on first hearing it).
Thus I would almost universally avoid deleting the pev- prefix, as well as the
mal- and zan- prefixes for pejorative and ameliorative interpretation, simply
because it causes confusion in a listener - which is the ultimate sin in
a language which stresses communicativeness to the end of logical evaluation.
This is to say that there may be a situation where I might approve of such
a deletion, but I can't think of one, and it would take a lot of argument to
convince me.  On the other hand, in nonce use, unmarked figuarative lujvo
may be tolerated (and in fact our most prolific Lojban poet, Michael Helsem,
inflicts all kinds of figuratives on us when he writes - but then no one has
ever said that they understood his poetry, either).  I would consider such
usage to be on the par with the use of "ain't" in a scholarly English paper,
but that doesn't make it illegal, merely unacceptable.

lojbab