From kalmas@udm.ru Mon Oct 13 13:48:03 2003 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-list); Mon, 13 Oct 2003 13:48:03 -0700 (PDT) Received: from aps.mark-itt.ru ([217.14.192.43]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.22) id 1A99bR-0005xC-JQ for lojban-list@lojban.org; Mon, 13 Oct 2003 13:47:41 -0700 Received: from [217.14.193.175] (HELO udm.ru) by aps.mark-itt.ru (CommuniGate Pro SMTP 4.0.6) with ESMTP-TLS id 64628936 for lojban-list@lojban.org; Tue, 14 Oct 2003 01:47:34 +0500 Message-ID: <3F8B0F8D.4050506@udm.ru> Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 01:48:13 +0500 From: Oleg Leschov User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 X-Accept-Language: ru, en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban-list@lojban.org Subject: [lojban] larger brodV - what do you think Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed X-archive-position: 6430 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: kalmas@udm.ru Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-list@lojban.org X-list: lojban-list Sometimes in engeneering practice (especially in software engineering), when designing some complex abstract system, there is a need to introduce new terms that would have concrete meaning in this system and are needed to be referenced frequently. I might preciecely define their semantical meaning using some common terms, or other specific terms like that. These terms may also be called "semantical macros", perhaps. So the point is, that it would be beneficial to give them some shorter and more sounding ids than "the thing described here and there", perhaps a whole new word or phrase, and to use it in any further work on the same subject. Of cause, I could just introduce a new terminology, but that might contradict (collide) with some already existing one, and so I would have to care for unambiguity in the text. So the idea is to create some entirely new and comparably short words for things I need, and maybe even later morph them by the lojban compound words creation rules. However, the words created for specific documents need not to be able to be found in all-time official lojban dictionary some day - they should have their meaning then and only then when the context somehow contains the document or a system that they were defined in (for). This means that they are a kind of "variables" (brodV and others) that lojban already has. Unlike these, however, the terms should be more sounding, and it should be possible to combine them by the rules of lojban morphology. Also, their possible meaning should not be limited to 1-place brivla - predicate of any valid number of places should be definable (using some general kind of description, perhaps). So I could just take any lojbanly-legal word as gismu for my new term and use that. But of cause this approach I do not like, for in the future, this particular gismu or their combination might acquire some completely different meaning. So what would I like to have is large enough "name space" the words from which could be used to represent local terminology, and which maybe could also be used generally, in case if speaker prefers them to things like "broda, by, my, ny" and the like. Any thoughts? Are there any possible yet unused namespaces that could be forever assigned the special meaning - no meaning outside of any valid context, not breaking existing lojban syntax? By namespaces I mean things like CCVCV + CVCCV - they are now gismu with universal meaning... Another example is existing brodV - this looks like a namespace I am talking about, but it is somewhat small for this task. There should be at least a couple of hundreds of words in it IMHO, that should be vocally broad (I mean, using all lojban sounds) so that the text that relies on them alot would look and sound nice. Note that I am myself not too competent in lojban yet because I've discovered it on the net somewhat recently (and hence I didn't propose any specific solution yet). So I think this language has quite a potential for technical and abstract definitions, and thus it could benefit from such a linguistic device.