Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: Jargon and Abbreviations

[Alex Rozenshteyn <rpglover64@gmail.com>]

I don't accept that fu'ivla are the right way to deal with jargon (except culturally specific words).  When I asked this question, I was imagining a lojbanistan where lojban is the primary language and a new field is developed, requiring new jargon.  I'd imagine that people would be reluctant to create new lujvo right away when old and established words suit their ideas mostly well enough; the old phrases/words might become jargon, carrying a meaning that is slightly different than their intended meaning.

I guess I'm wondering how lojban is expected to deal with the world changing out from under it slightly.

As for abbreviations, I meant things like Americans shortening "television" to "TV" or Francophones shortening "sympatique" to "sympa", and I was also thinking about acronyms a bit, e.g. MADD (mothers against drunk driving).

I'd assume that lojban would forbid both types.

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 4:49 PM, Zifre <kmicklas@gmail.com> wrote:

On Nov 12, 3:55 pm, Alex Rozenshteyn <rpglove...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I was just wondering a lot, and two thoughts came to mind that I wanted to
> ask the community.
>
> 1) How does lojban deal with jargon?  Mathematical jargon has been
> considered, but what about others?  In materials science, a "dislocation"
> means something completely different and only marginally related to what it
> means in medicine.  Do we just use the same word and rely on the fact that
> we're talking about people and not copper?

This is mainly what fu'ivla are for. Type 3 fu'ivla have a classifier
that tells the listener what general field you are dealing with. For
example, Esperanto could be bangrnesperanto.

In the examples you gave, dislocation might be saskrndislokeicyna and
mikcrndislokeicyna. (To those who know more about this than me, how do
you decide on the final vowel?)

> 2) Is there a lojbanic solution to the fact that people really like to
> shorten long, frequently used phrases?  It's inherently ambiguous in the way
> that lojban doesn't like, right?

Lojban can be as specific or as ambiguous as you want. Just because
Lojban is "logical" does not mean it doesn't work like any other human
language. To me, the important thing is that the grammar is
unambiguous. I think it is a good thing to be semantically ambiguous
in a lot of cases. From what I can tell, spoken Lojban is not really
any longer than English or any other language, especially when it is
not translated from another language. To give you an idea of how
simple Lojban phrases can be, here are some examples:

do mo - What are you doing? What's up? Who are you?
coi ma - Hello. What's your name?
ui na fasnu - I'm happy that it didn't happen.
mu'i ma do co'e - Why did you do it?
uu do cortu - This one is kind of hard to translate, possibly: I'm
sorry about your injury/pain.

As you can you, these are very short and ambiguous, yet follow the
rules of Lojban.

mu'o mi'e zif

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          Alex R

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