Subject: Re: [lojban] tertirxu

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 30 Jul 2000 01:10:28 -0400

At 10:32 AM 07/29/2000 -0700, Jim Carter wrote:
> > What I am finding difficult about Lojban is learning the right
> > place structures. Any patterns that can be discovered are always
> > full of exceptions, and the result is that I am usually not sure
> > whether or not a given gismu has some mysterious trailing places
> > that I am forgetting...
>
>Hear, hear! There's a lot of value to having regular place structures. I
>put a fair amount of work into regularizing the place structures in Old
>Loglan (an effort that didn't fly), and a lot of semantic categories are
>very amenable to a "bed of Procrustes" approach. I was disappointed when
>Lojban drifted off in the direction of custom-crafting each predicate's
>definition according to which arguments are most important to it.

You are mistaken to presume that we threw out your efforts, Jim. In 
general, words in a common semantic category have the same "arguments most 
important to it", but of course it is the grouping of words by common 
semantic categories that is the tough nut to crack, especially since Lojban 
tries to eschew such categorization as may be culturally biased. I though 
the place structures were fairly systematic based on my mind-set the last 
time I went through them before baselining, but I'm only human. People 
have found places where I was inconsistent, and probably they simply 
haven't discovered all the categorizations I used in deciding what to make 
similar to what else.

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
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