From: cbmvax!uunet!mullian.ee.mu.OZ.AU!nsn
Message-Id: <9105200019.19396@mullian.ee.mu.OZ.AU>
To: lojban-list@snark.thyrsus.com
Cc: nsn@mullian.ee.mu.oz.au
Subject: Re: More Chemelem stuff
Organisation: Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Melbourne
Smiley-Convention: %^)
Date: Mon, 20 May 91 10:19:35 +1000
Status: RO


la djan. cusku:
>la nitcion. cusku di'e:
>There is a difference between Type 4 le'avla and gismu, though, and that's
>the size of the rafsi.  

Well, at least you can make rafsi from le'avla - something I didn't know
until now. 

>This is a significant difference:  "lojbau" (the
>predicate form of "lojban.") is a lot more palatable than "lojbo,iybau".

I take your point that Zipfism may eventually force some cultural terms into
gismu, rather than le'avla 4 space; but note how you pick the most frequently
used klogi'u, lojbo. (Nothing wrong with that; the most frequently used noun
in Esperanto is Esperanto). Would I mind saying glico,iybau rather than glibau?
Not really. And it would at least make for consistency (though I'm not really
going to insist on this - lojban can live with its current klogi'u; but
people must understand that this 'unpalatability' of le'avla is something
they're going to have to get used to.)

>On the contrary.  The place structure of a tanru is indeed dictated by the
>place structure of the last element, but this rule does NOT hold for lujvo.

Ignorance (on my part) is such a burden, eh? Oh well. 

>It is frequently the case that lujvo either need places supplied from the
>nonfinal elements, or else have some of the places of the final element
>automatically filled in.

I don't like this, if only because this can't readily be algorithmed or
regularised. Yes, I know we aren't meant to do anything about lujvo places
prescriptively yet, but if I'm to guess which place structure goes where
with lujvo, I'll just stick to tanru.

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. The analogy between tanru and lujvo might just be strong
enough to drag lujvo towards a tanru place structure in the future.

What I'm sure of is that the second place of a lujvo should be that of its
final element. djim.'s use of {ja'irbi'o} honestly scares me. Note, of course,
that transitivity is a much wider concept in lojban than in Euro languages.
"I become you" is grammatically equivalent to "I love you", so {binxo} can
often be the final element of a transitive tanru/lujvo without too much fuss
(something not too hard, come to think of it, in English either: a "wife-
becomer"). The analysis of {spebi'o} (spouse-become, xu?) is transitive, and
not one of djim.'s event patterns, with the place structure of the nonfinal.
Harry spouse-became, not Harry spouse-became-to Sally. "Harry and Sally got
married" is better translated as {bi'ospe}. 

Shoulda brought my gismu list with me.

>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.  

Yes, but without a good way of guessing lujvo meanings, they're too much of
a hassle. I'm not memorising any dictionaries.

Me.