From @uga.cc.uga.edu:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Mon Sep 21 10:20:45 1992 Received: from uga.cc.uga.edu by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Mon, 21 Sep 1992 10:20:42 -0400 Received: from UGA.CC.UGA.EDU by uga.cc.uga.edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 6378; Mon, 21 Sep 92 10:19:30 EDT Received: by UGA (Mailer R2.08 PTF008) id 4714; Mon, 21 Sep 92 10:19:29 EDT Date: Mon, 21 Sep 1992 10:19:12 -0400 Reply-To: "Mark E. Shoulson" Sender: Lojban list From: "Mark E. Shoulson" Subject: TECH: Higley on lujvo, and general-purpose brivla X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch In-Reply-To: "(Logical Language Group)"'s message of Sun, 20 Sep 1992 23:18:02 -0400 Status: RO X-Status: Message-ID: Higley makes a good point, and it touches a little on something that I've been thinking about a lot myself. I mentioned this to Nick once in an IRC discussion. I feel that a lot of the lojban text written suffers from overuse of lujvo owing to a tendency to try to reproduce the specificity afforded by natural-language terms. I try to use more tanru than lujvo, and to be as non-specific as I can, while still saying what I want to say (with a few exceptions; e.g. I don't use {prenu} as "person" in the English meaning of "human being"--that's a "remna". {prenu} is more of "thinking being" or even "soul" (minus the religious and non-bodily connotations)). So I avoided Nick's {be'ipre} for "waiter": what did the {prenu} rafsi add? The waiter is just "that which carried the coffee": {le bevri be lei ckafi}. Sometimes you may need to be more specific, that's okay. But I think you'll find that you don't need to be specific as often as you might think at first. That the {bevri} was also a {prenu} gets cleared up later, when conversation is initiated. Higley's view of lujvo as "abbreviations" rather than "fixed tanru" is very cogent and, I suspect, very close to the official view of what lujvo should be. His example, {le'avla} is a good example. After all, {le'avla} expands to {lebna valsi} which is "take word" or better, "taker word"--a word which is somehow associated with a taker, perhaps. A more pedantic jvozba would have made it {selyle'vla}, for {se lebna valsi}: "taken-thing word", much closer to the meaning: a word which is taken. Note, though, that that's not what we use, nor should it be: you can't trust an expanded lujvo 100%, you can only assume that it's close to what the lujvo means. Lujvo are intended to be dictionary words, having their own definitions not precisely derived from their associated tanru (the selpinxe/se pinxe problem I had before is another good example. {selpinxe} is a good lujvo for {na'o se pinxe}, i.e. a beverage, as opposed to just plain {se pinxe} which could mean {ca'a se pinxe}, liquid-thing-sliding-down-someone's- throat.) More on the elimination (and desirability thereof) of unneeded specificity later, when I feel like it. ~mark