Return-Path: id AA01465; Mon, 20 May 91 10:34:59 EDT Date: Mon, 20 May 91 10:34:59 EDT Message-Id: <9105201435.AA01465@grackle.UUCP> To: ai-lab!nsn@mullian.ee.mu.oz.au Cc: ai-lab!lojban-list@snark.thyrsus.com In-Reply-To: ai-lab!nsn%mullian.ee.mu.oz.au's message of Mon, 20 May 91 10:19:35 +1000 <9105200019.19396@mullian.ee.mu.OZ.AU> Subject: tanru/lujvo Reply-To: cbmvax!uunet!gnu.ai.mit.edu!grackle!bob From: cbmvax!uunet!gnu.ai.mit.edu!grackle!bob Sender: cbmvax!uunet!gnu.ai.mit.edu!grackle!bob Status: RO X-From-Space-Date: Mon May 20 12:40:46 1991 X-From-Space-Address: cbmvax!uunet!ai.mit.edu!grackle!bob nsn%mullian.ee.mu.oz.au says What's going to be decisive is how people regard lujvo. Latent in how you and lojbab treat them is, I think, the concept that a lujvo is a "new word". Latent in djim.'s pan-predicatism and my distrust of extraneous places is the concept that a lujvo is just an abbreviation, semantically and syntactically equivalent to a tanru. This is a good insight. However, it may be the wrong distinction on which to focus attention. * Consider a tanru: to understand a tanru, a listener must select one of several possible meanings. A tanru contains *less* information than a full sentence using the concepts. For example: `the blue nest'. Do I mean the house for the blue aliens who live down the street? Or the bluebird's nest? Or Horace's house, which is painted blue? A tanru requires semantic disambiguation. * Consider a lujvo: derived from a tanru, a lujvo could be considered an abbreviation of a tanru. But I don't think that people will use lujvo that way. I think that people will use lujvo as if they were single words, just as in English, we use `understand' as a single word. My expectation is that a lujvo will become limited to just one of its many possible tanru-derived meanings; or at least, to as few meanings as a gismu. (This is a hypothesis, testable after lots of people learn to speak Lojban.) nsn%mullian quotes John as saying >The whole purpose of lujvo, as opposed to tanru, is to "freeze" >some of these decisions so they do not have to be thought out on >the fly. and responds Yes, but without a good way of guessing lujvo meanings, they're too much of a hassle. I'm not memorising any dictionaries. No more of a hassle than learning English. As a child, you learned thousands of words of your native language; learning lujvo and gismu is similar, except that learning a second language as an adult is harder (or seems harder) than learning a second language as a small child. But lujvo may be easier to learn than gismu (once you have learned gismu) since the specific meaning of a lujvo is one of the multiple interpretations of the tanru from which the lujvo derives. (Another topic for someone to research!) Freezing meanings is very important. The more ambiguity in a sentence, the harder it is to understand. (Yet another hypothesis and yet another research topic!) Robert J. Chassell bob@gnu.ai.mit.edu Rattlesnake Mountain Road (413) 298-4725 or (617) 253-8568 or Stockbridge, MA 01262-0693 USA (617) 876-3296 (for messages)