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At 11:03 AM 6/3/03 -0400, you wrote:
Robert LeChevalier scripsit: > The West shortened "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" to "Soviet > Union". I've never seen a comparable shortening in Russian, and SSSR > seemed to be spelled out a lot more than USSR was in the stuff I've seen. Say what? "Soviet Union" is a half-translation of "Sov'etskij Soyuz", certainly a common expression when I was learning Russian in 1976.
I stand corrected. Bad example while half asleep. I was trying to think of a phrase involving the word for government which in Russian is as long winded as the one for artistic (gosudarstvenoye), but that one slipped out instead. I could also have used good old fashioned "please" (pozhaluista).
> So long as the cmavo are a closed set, every word amongst them will cover a> range of meaning and hence be to some degree polysemous. Polysemy is more than covering a range of meanings: it is covering a *discontinuous* range of meanings, e.g. English "sound". _Ruka_ is monosemous even though it covers the domain of both "hand" and "arm".
The question of whether meanings are continuous or not is difficult. Most polysemy in natlangs comes from metaphorical extension that retains continuity at the time it occurs, but the connection is lost or forgotten. I don't think any of the gadri could easily become discontinuous in meaning unless we defined a discontinuity.
lojbab -- lojbab lojbab@hidden.email Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org