Lojban names and fu'ivla

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@access.digex.net>]

>From: ucleaar <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>
>In Lojban, the name/non-name distinction is both morphological and
>semanticosyntactic.  Morphologically, the situation is similar to
>Livagian, in that names are always distinguishable from non-names,
>though unlike in Livagian, it's impossible for Lojban names to be
>homonyms (because in Lojban names don't denote anything; they're merely
>ad hoc labels for whichever specific individuals the speaker wishes to
>apply them to).  Syntactically, the names function as syntactic
>arguments referring to individuals.  If you wanted the name to denote a
>predicate the best one can do is to create a "fuivla", a predicate
>denoting lexeme characterized by certain morphologically properties:  a
>fuivla isn't a compound and can't be a constituent of a (morphological)
>compound, and it must obey some fearsomely complex phonotactic
>constraints.  Fuivla can't be homonyms, though.
>
>Overall I think the Livagian system is better (- of course, for if I
>thought the Lojban system superior, that's how Livagian would work too!
>[Needless to say, part of the appeal of Lojban is that it is susceptible
>to criticisms such as these, since it aspires to be rational in
>preference to being a near facsimile of natural languages]), because
>it's easier for names (= more readily homonymous and neologizable,
>phonotactically less constrained) to denote predicates.  Sometimes it's
>adequate for them to denote individuals, as in

Remember of course that names are fu'ivla, specifically of the "type 2"
variety, where type 1 is delimited quoted text, and type 3 is what you
are presumably referring to as fu'ivla.  Each type is morphologically
distinct from the other types, and some are syntactically so.  The
latter means that a given type of fu'ivla may need to undergo some kind
of grammatical trnsformation with cmavo in order to fit some broader
semantosyntactic (or philosophoical) category, like "predicate".

lojbab