Message-ID: <43FC7BD2.9070806@gmx.net>
Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2006 15:57:22 +0100
From: Torsten Schlabach <tschlabach@gmx.net>
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To:  lojban-beginners@lojban.org
Subject: [lojban-beginners] Wrestling with words: IT technical and business
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Dear all,

being somewhat new to Lojban, I think I understood that using Lojban 
would probably benefit both texts and user interfaces in the context of 
IT systems. Anyone who has stayed around in IT for a while knows that 
for many concepts in IT there are words - basically metaphors - taken 
from the english language, such as "a file", "a server", ...

For the native english speakers amoung readers: I am not sure if you can 
imagine that IT professionals use terms such as "file" or "server" in 
their everyday work *without* really heaving the concept of their 
original meaning. For example, to anyone in IT land a server usually is 
a box with some CPU, memory and harddrives in it sitting either 
underneath someone's desk or in a cabit that might be in a data centre 
somewhere. Few IT people who are not native english speakers are aware 
of the fact that there were servers that serve you food and drinks long 
before IT servers.

In the meanwhile many terms in IT are entirely overloaded with several 
meanings depending on context, history or articially built up concepts 
by some companies' marekting departments. My typical example here is 
"service". I think I can easily name about a dozend of entirely 
different and unrelated concepts in IT that are called "service".

As Lojban aims at being unambigous in semantics, wouldn't it be nice to 
name real world objects as well as concepts in IT by Lojban words?

Having had a look at the Lojban Wiki, I found two pages which appeared 
promising to be:

http://jbovlaste.lojban.org//wiki/Computer%20Terminology
http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Computer+terminology&bl

Those lists are not yet that comprehensive, unfortunately, on the one 
hand. On the other hand, I found two words that I was interested in, 
which are seltcana (Network it its broadest sense) and velsku (a medium 
of expression).

Well, to me a network is a medium which I use to exchange information. 
So what would be the difference between a seltcana and velsku? Would 
velsku be a special form of a seltcana?

Does lojban have the concept of subclasses as in OO, i.e. I can have a 
gismu / lujvo explaining a broad concept (vehicle) and other gismu / 
lujvo which describe more concrete instances (car, truck, ...)?

Any thought are welcome!

Regards,
Torsten