Re: current cmene project

[ucleaar <ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk>]

Lojbab writes:
> UC> I quite agree, I can use any cmene I like to refer to Washington D.C.
> UC> My point is that if someone is going to the trouble of thinking up a
> UC> cmevla (cmene zei valsi) for Wash.D.C. then they might as well come
> UC> up with a fuhivla (which is not a name, & whose meaning is absolute),
> UC> since fuhivla are part of the language (or rather, I should say, part of
> UC> the lexicon/grammar).
>
> So are cmevla.  And what they "mean" or "refer to" have the same conditions
> 1) if they are nonce cmevla/fu'ivla, then they mean what the speaker intends
> them to mean  (or at least what he expects the listener to understand - I
> disagree with your assertion that my use of a name means that the name is
> necessarily what *I* choose to call it instead of what someone else might
> choose), with as many referents as the speaker might intend them to refer
> to.  This is true for fu'ivla or cmevla.
> 2) If they appear in the dictionary, they acquire the prescriptive force
> that dictionaries tend to acquire by the way people use them.  In this case
> they tend to have the meaning attributed to them in the dictionary - again
> this may be singular in reference only if the dictionary implies that it is,

I think there's a fundamental difference between cmene and fuhivla, whether
they're nonce or conventional. The difference between nonce and conventional
concerns the interlocutors' knowledge of the word, while the difference
between cmene and fuhivla concerns the way the semantics of these words
work: fuhivla have definitions, while cmene only have definitions in that
'la X' means 'lo thing-named-"X"'. Any conceivable cmene already exists
in Lojban, since Lojban fully specifies the meaning of the cmene, whereas a
nonce fuhivla is a genuine innovation in the language, because of the
novel meaning.

----
And