From LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@uga.cc.uga.edu Tue May 16 05:40:58 1995 Date: Tue, 16 May 1995 04:20:08 -0400 From: "Dylan P. Thurston" Subject: Revenge of the Fat Gismu (no longer Re: TEXT: le gunse ku joi le lorxu) To: Bob LeChevalier Message-ID: la lojbab cusku di'e > ... > Even before Jorge, the wave of expanding place strutures subsided and many > were eliminated. Jorge would have us eliminate still more, but I think > we have reached a good balance. What complacency! We must be ever vigilant defenders of the faith, seeking out extraneous terbridi wherever they may hide and eradicating them! :-) Seriously, the gismu list is mostly excellent. But there are still some extra places and lapses in uniformity. Your {klupe} is a good example--why does it have a place for the threads when {dinko} (nail) doesn't have one for the point? Sorry to ask, but why haven't you fixed it? (Time constraints would be a good bet, I suppose.) The "planetary characteristics" of {mluni} and {plini} was another good example. It's just far too vague to have a place. (Unless it's meant to be a material--but then the definition should say that). Or take the motion verbs expressing a manner of movement. I count the following: cadzu x1 walks/strides/paces on surface x2 using limbs x3 bajra x1 runs on surface x2 using limbs x3 with gait x4 stapa x1 steps/treads on/in surface x2 using limbs x3 vofli x1 flies [in air/atmosphere] using lifting/propulsion means x2 cpare x1 climbs/clambers/creeps/crawls on surface x2 in direction x3 using x4 [limbs/tools] farlu x1 falls/drops to x2 from x3 in gravity well/frame of reference x4 sfubu x1 dives/swoops [manner of controlled falling] to x2 from x3 plipe x1 (agent/object) leaps/jumps/springs/bounds to x2 from x3 reaching height x4 propelled by x5 IMHO, these are similar predicates and should have similar place structure. But: only some include the medium; {cpare}, uniquely among all motion verbs, includes a direction; {bajra} but not {cadzu} includes a gait; and {farlu}, {sfubu}, and {plipe} but not the rest include source & destination. As a result, it's very difficult to talk about someone falling down an infinite pit (consider, for instance, Alice falling down the rabbit-hole in "Alice in Wonderland"[1]). [1] Yes, there is a source and destination, but they're not relevant to Alice in the middle of the fall; if I recall correctly, she wonders at one point whether the fall will ever end. That would currently have to be translated as wondering whether a terbridi has a value (!). > One just has to be wary NOT to use a brivla > metaphorically unless you can metaphorize all of the places of the place > structure. Yes, good advice; PROVIDED the gismu doesn't have extraneous places. A good (very long-term) project would be to give examples for the gismu list, covering both allowed and disallowed usages. In particular, this would guarantee that all the places can be filled reasonably concisely, something I sometimes get suspicious about. > lojbab mu'o mi'e. dilyn. >From lojbab To: DPT@HUMA1.BITNET Subject: Re: Revenge of the Fat Gismu (no longer Re: TEXT: le gunse ku joi le lorxu) Why haven't we fixed klupe? Because a while back we decided it was time to quit playing with the language design and write the books. Now due to overload neither books nor design changes are getting done, but adding changes will make that situation worse and not better. In the case of klupe vs. dinko, it is always the case that a screw has threads, annd it need not be the case that a dinko has a point per se (if it does, the use of jesni might be in order to talk about it). Furthermore, the screw threads in some kinds of screws (e.g. worm gears) are really rather separate things than the support fopr the threads, hence I decided not to eliminate the added place. There is also a little history in these object gismu. At one point very early on, we identified a clear semantic distinction, a hierarchy as it were from tutci-cabra-minji-zukte. Some of the place additions came from a mistaken attempt to say that some gismu were necessarily subclasses of one of these - e.g. a mruli is always a tutci etc. and it was for brevity that we trasfered some places of tutci to mruli. The fallacy became obvious rather quickly in a community with a lot of science fiction readers and others with imaginations, and most were eliminated strictlywhere they were added for that reason. The klupe places I think were added earlier, from thinking about the actual range of things we wanted to cvover with klupe, so it was not changed. lojbab Cc: lojban >From jimc@math.ucla.edu To: Logical Language Group Subject: Re: TEXT: le gunse ku joi le lorxu Date: Tue, 16 May 95 08:05:45 -0700 > It actually had little to do with my studies in astronomy. Even before I > was serious about Loglan, others (jimc???) were arguing about adding gravity > well places to > "fall" and "orientation" places to directions and "standards" places to color > s. No, I don't think this can be blamed partially on me. I was more oriented to the "lean lujvo" policy. I think. -- jimc