From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Fri Oct 26 06:03:24 2007 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Fri, 26 Oct 2007 06:03:24 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.67) (envelope-from ) id 1IlOqG-00064k-CS for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Fri, 26 Oct 2007 06:03:19 -0700 Received: from eastrmmtao102.cox.net ([68.230.240.8]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.67) (envelope-from ) id 1IlOq0-00064B-4W for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Fri, 26 Oct 2007 06:03:07 -0700 Received: from eastrmimpo01.cox.net ([68.1.16.119]) by eastrmmtao102.cox.net (InterMail vM.7.08.02.01 201-2186-121-102-20070209) with ESMTP id <20071026130232.ONAS1350.eastrmmtao102.cox.net@eastrmimpo01.cox.net> for ; Fri, 26 Oct 2007 09:02:32 -0400 Received: from [127.0.0.1] ([72.192.234.183]) by eastrmimpo01.cox.net with bizsmtp id 512P1Y00M3y5FKc0000000; Fri, 26 Oct 2007 09:02:25 -0400 Message-ID: <4721E54F.7070001@lojban.org> Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2007 09:02:07 -0400 From: Robert LeChevalier User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7 (Windows/20050923) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: geodesic dome References: <821531.97363.qm@web27709.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> <2204fa080710250218g1d01c396gc2cffe2594094d0a@mail.gmail.com> <47209CB8.8070703@lojban.org> <975a94850710250956t2cd0e855ncce7c1681ff719e2@mail.gmail.com> <4720DEC4.3040806@lojban.org> <975a94850710251146g2f1cb00eka98d0ec87c02ae3b@mail.gmail.com> <47210CF9.9010906@lojban.org> <975a94850710251510h57f6d0d1ue3d900ca8b7369f9@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <975a94850710251510h57f6d0d1ue3d900ca8b7369f9@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Spam-Score: 0.0 X-Spam-Score-Int: 0 X-Spam-Bar: / X-archive-position: 5681 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: lojbab@lojban.org Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@lojban.org X-list: lojban-beginners Joel Shellman wrote: > eg. "a spherish stonish-substance building used for residence"--a good > chance it means monolithic dome home. (though if it's specifically > sphere-ish and not ellipsoid, that wouldn't necessarily be accurate). > > It seems to me that rekyboldi'u should mean exactly what it says--any > spher-ish frame-ish building. That is one philosophy of lujvo-making, but it leads to very long lujvo, possibly with lots of extraneous places if you follow jvojva rules. Zipf's law implies that such is inappropriate for concepts that see a lot of use. I do favor the use of short general lujvo when indeed there are likely to be multiple longer concepts that will be made from it. I don't think that applies here. There are rather limited numbers of dome structures, fewer still whose frame-structure is an important part of the concept. Of those, only geodesic domes are a sufficiently coherent concept that we would plausibly consider a single word for that concept. For the other sorts of domes I mentioned, I would likely include a hint at their function in a lujvo, because its dome-nature stems from that function. The whole point in making a lujvo is to shorten an expression for a frequently used concept into a single word. If it isn't significantly shorter, there is probably no point (another reason might be to fix an arbitrary place structure to the concept that would be hard to express in tanru form). And if fu'ivla borrowings are shorter than lujvo, people will tend to borrow rather than coin lujvo. This isn't a good thing for growing a language (and is part of the reason I have opposed officially making short fu'ivla, which we call type IV fu'ivla at this time) > If context is insufficient, the speaker > should use a more specific lujvo, or explain further. That is fine for a lengthy academic discussion, but not for ordinary conversation. >>Knowing that we want the word to mean "geodesic dome", we might get the >>following place structure for rekyboldi'u: >>x1 is a geodesic (semi-spherical) dome for purpose x2, of material x3, >>using polygon forms x4 > > Got it. I would expect semantics would resolve that in many instances. One hopes, but different people will get different places, and different orders to the places. > Hmmm.... but it is slightly unfortunate: > >>Some have attempted to devise conventions for predicting the place >>structures (jvojva), but those conventions are not fully deterministic, > > It seems to me this would be an obstacle to creating a general > programmatic parsing/"comprehension" of the langauge. If there is no > deterministic way of figuring out the place meanings... Obviously, one would have to build a dictionary into a program. Programmatic lujvo would mean you would only need gismu and fu'ivla in that dictionary, but since fu'ivla are an open-ended set, you haven't really simplified the problem. So there is no advantage for the computability aspect. And at some point the language will have a robust enough lexicon that word-creation will cease to be a major activity - though probably a bit more frequent than English speakers make up new words. If most people follow jvojva completely or approximately for most lujvo-making, then it does reduce the learning curve. But learning to use the jvojva themselves is hardly a beginner concept, since even the most skilled users of the language haven't mastered the practice. lojbab