Re: Ethnic Gismu, Learning

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>]

Semantics will always be tricky, and no amount of "logical language" will
really help that.  A word will have both denotations and connotations, and
the latter will vary with the individual.

Given this, it is possible to look at a compound (either a tanru or a lujvo)
as a single unit of meaning - a predicate that relates a bunch of arguments.
The exact nature of that relationship is what is subject to semantic
variance.

Thus, until you start trying to analyze the internals of a unit of meaning,
a tanru or lujvo is no less and no more logical than any gismu in the language.
That a lujvo has an internal structure, one that is unambiguous as to
the structural factors in the meaning, makes its internals comparable to
the similarly unambiguous syntactic structures of the language.  Likewise,
the syntactic structure of tanru is also unambiguous.

All that remains therefore is the semantic realm, and there is no possibility
of doing better than our gismu in terms of semantics, no matter what
avenues we employ, and the semantics of lujvo and tanru are essentially as
well defined as those of gismu.

You can if you wish be more explicit in stating the semantics of "blanu drudi"
as you have in your example, but your meaning is still no clearer than the
definitions of the x1 place of blanu and the x1 place of drudi.  On top of
that inherent fuzziness, I don't see the semantic ambiguity of tanru as a
major drop in effectiveness of communication.

lojbab