Re: male/female, man/woman, human/person

[John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>]

la marvn. cusku 
> 
> > Similarly, tanru of the form "nanmu/ninmu broda" are hard to construe.  Just
> >  what
> > is supposed to be a "male human" or "female human" attribute, beyond the
> > anatomical?  It's too culture-specific.
> 
>   Yes, but this isn't wha I was talking about.  I was refering to the
> difference between the two brivla "ninmu" and "fetpre".  Perhaps I've
> misunderstood what you mean, but  attributes don't come into this any more
> than they do in any brivla.

The gismu list says that the use of "nanmu" and "ninmu" may be sexist in
metaphors (tanru) and examples, not in general use.  "la alis. ninmu" is an
unexceptionable sentence.

> A bridi is the statement of a relationship,
> and to express that you have to use the words you have.  To do _that_, you
> have to have an agreed upon meaning for those words.

True, but an agreed-on meaning is not the same as a prescribed meaning.
The words of Esperanto did not have their meaning prescribed by the language
designer; instead, the precise meanings were settled by usage and eventually
encoded in a dictionary.

> > Meaning is a sticky issue that we avoid defining as much as we can, and so
> > synonymy of predicates is not part of the Lojban definition.
> 
>   How can the definer of a language avoid defining meaning of words?
> Isn't meaning a fundamental necesity in both speaking and understanding a
> language?

I said "avoid as much as we can".  In particular, we refrain from definition
on whether two predicates are synonymous or not.  Is "to'erbarda" the same as
"cmalu"?  Usage, not language design, will decide this question.

> > In addition, "fetpre" may include a female cat that has a personality (to the
> > speaker), whereas "ninmu" surely excludes such a one.  I think the use of
> > "humanoid" in the place structure is plain waffling.... female chimps?
> > female ETIs?
> 
>   My understanding is that "prenu" is basically the same word as "person"
> in English (at least, according to its definition in the dictionary).
> Saying someone is a person doesn't imply that they are human, true, but it
> also implies, in my opinion, at least sentience.

The defining characteristic of "prenu" is not sentience but personality.  Whether
your cats, or any cats, have personalities is up to you.  My cats do, so they
are {mlatyprenu}.

>   Anyway, my point is this: why do we need gismu that can easily be
> duplicated by by tanru/lujvo?  It seems counter-productive to the goal of
> an easily learned language.

Okay, now we get to the central issue.  The gismu are not intended to be in any
sense a minimal set of semantic primitives.  Rather, they are a practical list
compiled from many sources that are intended to blanket semantic space.  No claim
is made that every gismu is necessary; the claim, rather, is that no predicate
(except for the semantically broad and shallow areas like plants, animals, cultures,
foods, and the like) cannot be covered by a gismu or a reasonable-sized lujvo.

-- 
John Cowan						cowan@ccil.org
			e'osai ko sarji la lojban