From LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@uga.cc.uga.edu Sat Mar 6 23:01:22 2010 Received: from uga.cc.uga.edu by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Sun, 20 Sep 1992 23:20:11 -0400 Received: from UGA.CC.UGA.EDU by uga.cc.uga.edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 4367; Sun, 20 Sep 92 23:19:01 EDT Received: by UGA (Mailer R2.08 PTF008) id 6483; Sun, 20 Sep 92 23:18:59 EDT Date: Sun, 20 Sep 1992 23:18:02 -0400 Reply-To: "(Logical Language Group)" Sender: Lojban list From: "(Logical Language Group)" Subject: TECH: Higley on lujvo X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch Status: O X-Status: X-From-Space-Date: Sun Sep 20 23:20:13 1992 X-From-Space-Address: @uga.cc.uga.edu:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Message-ID: On lujvo I'd like to make a few comments on nu jvozba1. As I've read, the current policy of la lojbangirz is "Let a thousand flowers bloom." While at first I was opposed to this, I now see the wisdom of it: How could it be otherwise? I've decided after much thought to disband the lujvo pulji1 and let the prisoners go. 1nu jvozba "lujvo-making"; lujvo pulji "lujvo-police" But this doesn't mean that I don't have anything to say on the topic of nu jvozba! Au contraire, mon fr re! I have actually come 180x from my old viewpoint: I'd like to suggest DD since "suggest" is really all I can do DD that a different view of lujvo be adopted. As I understand it, a lujvo, as currently defined, is a tanru that has been "compressed" into a single word, and that has been assigned a fixed meaning. (And I guess a new place structure, as well.) Thus the essential difference between the tanru "remna sovda" and the lujvo "remso'a" is that the former does not have a fixed meaning, it might mean "the human's egg", i.e., the one he had for breakfast, or it could mean the same thing as (what I'm suggesting for) remso'a, namely "human ovum", i.e. the female human reproductive cell. I see lujvo more as "abbreviations" than "fixed tanru": I don't think a lujvo has to be so exact that its meaning is crystal clear. Then we'd have huge lujvo. I see the parts of a lujvo as forming a "memory hook" which can be used to remember its meaning, and which, knowing the concept, can be used to remember the lujvo. I don't think that, seeing a lujvo on a page, you should instantly be able to know what it means. Rather, finding out what it means, you should then be able to more easily remember it. Case in point is "le'avla". This is a word well-known to Lojbanists, but let us assume that we've never seen it before. Would you know what it meant, just by looking at it? You could rely on the context in which it occurs, but what if there were no context, or what if the context wasn't informative enough? You could probably make some educated guesses, butlet's face it, "le'avla" is not a very clear lujvo as lujvo go. Expanding it into a tanru is just as unhelpful: "lebna valsi" is just as nebulous. And yet I'd like to argue that this is just exactly how lujvo should be made! Once you discover the meaning of "le'avla", you aren't likely to forget it: You can now see why it means what it does. This is similar to the process that goes on with an abbreviation, although thankfully lujvo have clearer parts than abbreviations. You can't necessarily figure out the meaning from the abbreviation, but you can figure out the abbreviation from the meaning. With lujvo, it might be more accurate to say that, given a list of lujvo, you could pick out the one that corresponds to the concept in question. "General Purpose Lujvo" One of the reasons why I don't do much translating from English to Lojban, or from Welsh to Lojban, is that in order to do this with any reasonable degree of accuracy, you have to make lujvo. Well, I do make them, but I usually don't start out with an English or Welsh word or concept that I'd like to translate into English. I start out with the gismu list and just start combining, trying to see which combin- ations suggest meaningful concepts. This is how I arrived at the idea of "General Purpose Lujvo". While making lujvo in this way, I'd often come across a word which had no exact equivalent in English, but which seemed to be use- ful nevertheless. A good example is "zaltapla". This is anything ground up and made into a patty. It doesn't have to be meat, doesn't even have to be food. If you're eating a hamburger, and you call it le zaltapla, you aren't likely to be misunderstood, and you can always get more specific if you want. I find that this makes Lojban much more interesting, because it divides the semantic space in a different, perhaps "Lojbanic" way, and it helps me to think "Lojban- ically". If you wanted to say "That hamburger looks good" in Lojban, you're likely to try to make the word for "hamburger" very specific. While there's nothing wrong with this DD clarity is a good thing DD I think doing this makes Lojban no more than a code into which we trans- late the pre-existing concepts of other languages. With GPL, or even lujvo that are unique, but with specific meanings (SPL "Specific Pur- pose Lujvo"?), we can build a language that is not just a code, but a living language of its own, that divides the semantic space in its own way. Greg Higley