Re: The place structure of {speni} in regards to cultural neutrality

On Wed, 15 Oct 2003, Jorge Llambías wrote:

> >   Definition: x1 is married to x2; x1 is a spouse of x2 under
> >             law/custom/tradition/system/convention x3
> >
> > Doesn't this entail monogamy, or at least a dyadic relation?
>
> It doesn't entail monogamy, just like zunle does not entail that
> x1 is the only thing to the left of x2 or that it is not to the left
> of anything else. It would only entail monogamy if the x3 is a
> law/custom/tradition/system/convention that only allows monogamous
> marriages.

That's right. Thanks for the nice explanation.

> It is a dyadic relation, but this is not so much a matter of
> lack of neutrality as the fact that Lojban does not deal well
> with an open ended number of argumants. For example, {sumji}
> could be "x1 is the sum of x2, x3, x4, ..." but it is defined
> with three places only.
>
> To say that a group of people are mutually married, we can
> use {spesi'u}, but I'm not sure how we can get a place structure
> like "x1, x2, x3, x4 ... are in a marriage together".

We could have a "married" predicate in which the first argument is a
group, which says that all the members of the group are married together.
Similar to the thing they did for {casnu}.

Now, I wonder if, in cultures that have polygyny, whether the wives refer
to any one of their co-wives by the same word that their husband uses to
refer to any one of his wives?

-- 
Arnt Richard Johansen                                http://arj.nvg.org/
Information wants to be antropomorhized!

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