The bear... no, not that bear, the other bear--yes, I know it's a dead bear... what, you call that a corpse and not a bear? Okay, the new corpse of a former bear, the one that is right over there...
When does a bear stop (or start) being a bear? The 'bear goo' quickly boils down to "what you believe in" and that (surprise!) people have different views, even if we restrict "bear" to only living individuals of the family Ursidae--is it a bear from the time of conception, or even before that, or maybe only at or some time after birth, or always, or never?
Of course you could be more specific--pa vizyci'ojvemrojvesofyjvericparcribe, for example--but now it takes forever to say anything, and you'll lose some of the audience--"the magistrates however replied that they had forgotten the things which had been spoken at the beginning"--and you can probably still find someone for whom the "nearby young and dead and soviet and tree-climbing bear" is still a bit too fuzzy, or anyways there will be people who will disagree with (or ignore) whatever arbitrary definition of bear you've cooked up. Maybe there are two such bears, or they'll quibble that a corpse is clearly not a bear, or they'll happily modify your oh-so-precise definition to mean something else, if you know what I mean, nudge nudge wink wink say no more because The Algorithm plusgoods discussions about bears, and so they use 'bear' to talk about something else while still collecting all those sweet, sweet plusgoods.
Also, lojban does not eliminate ambiguity, zo'e co'e be do'e zu'i, but we're za'o into nunribypevykreborvi'u. A shaved bear would be less fuzzy?
When does a bear stop (or start) being a bear? The 'bear goo' quickly boils down to "what you believe in" and that (surprise!) people have different views, even if we restrict "bear" to only living individuals of the family Ursidae--is it a bear from the time of conception, or even before that, or maybe only at or some time after birth, or always, or never?
Of course you could be more specific--pa vizyci'ojvemrojvesofyjvericparcribe, for example--but now it takes forever to say anything, and you'll lose some of the audience--"the magistrates however replied that they had forgotten the things which had been spoken at the beginning"--and you can probably still find someone for whom the "nearby young and dead and soviet and tree-climbing bear" is still a bit too fuzzy, or anyways there will be people who will disagree with (or ignore) whatever arbitrary definition of bear you've cooked up. Maybe there are two such bears, or they'll quibble that a corpse is clearly not a bear, or they'll happily modify your oh-so-precise definition to mean something else, if you know what I mean, nudge nudge wink wink say no more because The Algorithm plusgoods discussions about bears, and so they use 'bear' to talk about something else while still collecting all those sweet, sweet plusgoods.
Also, lojban does not eliminate ambiguity, zo'e co'e be do'e zu'i, but we're za'o into nunribypevykreborvi'u. A shaved bear would be less fuzzy?