From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Wed Sep 07 07:22:23 2005 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Wed, 07 Sep 2005 11:06:57 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.52) id 1ED0oh-0005Mz-Lg for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Wed, 07 Sep 2005 07:22:23 -0700 Received: from rproxy.gmail.com ([64.233.170.194]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.52) id 1ED0od-0005Mr-2u for lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org; Wed, 07 Sep 2005 07:22:23 -0700 Received: by rproxy.gmail.com with SMTP id j1so1178281rnf for ; Wed, 07 Sep 2005 07:22:17 -0700 (PDT) DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=beta; d=gmail.com; h=received:message-id:date:from:reply-to:to:subject:in-reply-to:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition:references; b=TUri49vIRfKGfYK+Fc1+9kzojt6YI+E4cAtvzSbzrjEMw5bUfveIAF9m7SROTbZVHg03aWHdmHjfGKqDF7nl9QgWElGp/QdlgsKqX1Ll8/M8LSKS/30UFMOJdIj8d2Tt+q+yMxpeUiQ8n+1W9da5UNPSrW5qu/LY94vqFye5s7U= Received: by 10.38.75.25 with SMTP id x25mr11477rna; Wed, 07 Sep 2005 07:22:17 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.38.89.61 with HTTP; Wed, 7 Sep 2005 07:22:16 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: Date: Wed, 7 Sep 2005 10:22:16 -0400 From: Christopher Zervic To: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: three-letter gismu? In-Reply-To: <431ECD79.8040003@gulik.co.nz> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by Ecartis Content-Disposition: inline References: <431D5994.8070009@gulik.co.nz> <2d3df92a050906072639f0c403@mail.gmail.com> <431ECD79.8040003@gulik.co.nz> X-Spam-Score: -2.5 (--) X-archive-position: 2008 X-Approved-By: rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-original-sender: zervic@gmail.com Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-list: lojban-beginners On 9/7/05, Michael van der Gulik wrote: > After looking through the Lojbanic dictionary, I'm pretty certain that a > lot of words can be trimmed. E.g: > > mamta -> nimrir > patfu -> naurir > verba -> selrir mamta and nimrir are not the same. nimrir means a female human being parent, mamta as I understand it means mother, any species. Why not get rid of rirni? But I wouldn't. In a Lojban-to-Lojban dictionary you need other words of a similar meaning to craft a definition. > Infact, I can't believe there are gismu for some of the words. I would, > for example (running finger down page) never had made "vinji"-airplane. > Wouldn't varma'e be better? It is only one letter longer and saves > people needing to learn that extra gismu. Is a Zeppelin not also a varma'e? A hot air balloon? A helicopter? A ski gondola? The General Lee (sometimes)? A better case could be made for volmi'i but that still overlaps with helicopter. I prefer gismu (+ tanru) to lujvo anyhow, for beginners it's easier to look up a gismu than to deconstruct a lujvo, determine the rafsi and then look up the gismu they represent. (Assuming the lujvo is not in the dictionary, but when the literature starts to grow this will happen.) Someone with no prior contact with Lojban would be 100% bewildered by the previous paragraph. > BTW, xorxes: Vorlin looked interesting... until I discovered that the > inventer created a whole new charactor ("crossed n") that doesn't even > exist in the unicode character set. o'onairu'e Actually Rick Harrison left the matter open to usage, suggesting a unicode-ready alternative (eng) and an ISO 8859-1 alternative (mu), both of equal value with the n+crossed tail. Harrison had aesthetic concerns on his mind and sought to give Vorlin a feature unique unto itself. He spoke positively of Esperanto's circumflexes and Volapuk's umlauts. Harrison proposed a reform of Esperanto in which he didn't touched the circumflexes. Plus, with over a million unused codepoints in Unicode, the Standard could one day contain the glyph, but Vorlin is on hold probably forever. -- Christopher Zervic, Esq.