Message-Id: <199709120639.BAA29646@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: Logical Language Group Date: Fri Sep 12 01:39:40 1997 Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: pocket dictionary X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 Content-Length: 2467 X-From-Space-Date: Fri Sep 12 01:39:40 1997 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU George Foot asked about the pocket dictionary. The idea for this came from people appreciating the ad hoc pocket dictionaries that Nora and I prepared for our own use the last time we taught a Lojban class. Sparse but quite convenient, we ended up making 10 copies of these,a and 9 were distributed (the last was damaged and is unusable) to first requesters. These pocket dictionaries consisted of nicely formatted gismu and cmavo lists in Lojban order, rafsi lists, and EBNF and YACC grammar. For the publication, we would add some level of English order listing, but it will be much shorter than the draft-dictionary file now on our ftp site. At this point we do not plan to include any lujvo lists (except insofar as they appear by reference in the gismu list). We can consider a broief thesaurus listing, but this might have to wait for the full dictionary. There have been at least 3 attempts to thesaurusize the gismu, but all were in the early pahses of the project and have considerable flaws. Indeed, the thesaurus concept is ill suited for a predicate language - "klama" for example must go under a verb (go/come) as well as under each of its five places (go-er, destination, origin, route and mode), by which time it is properly scattered on so many pages as to be difficult to use. The current gismu list has a roster of notes "see also ..." that acts as an informal thesaurus. The important point about the poicket dictionary is to make it pocketsize and portable. The full dictionary is likely to be a multivolume (hopefully only 2 but we'll see) tome - the last page count that I had was over 1300 pages and growing significantly in the future. This will not be small, nor will it be cheap. the pocket dictionary should be more reasonably priced. Since most of thge parts of the pocket dictionary are more or less done, the prinary job is editing and formatting it into a single book-document. The full dictionary needs a bit more work, because of the low confidence level that the cmavo and lujvo lists as they exist now are adequate for a full dictionary. lojbab ---- lojbab lojbab@access.digex.net Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: ftp.access.digex.net /pub/access/lojbab or see Lojban WWW Server: href="http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban/"