[lojban-beginners] Re: three-letter gismu?

[Christopher Zervic <zervic@gmail.com>]

On 9/7/05, Michael van der Gulik <mikevdg@gulik.co.nz> wrote:
> After looking through the Lojbanic dictionary, I'm pretty certain that a
> lot of words can be trimmed. E.g:
> 
> mamta -> nimrir
> patfu -> naurir
> verba -> selrir

mamta and nimrir are not the same. nimrir means a female human being
parent, mamta as I understand it means mother, any species.

Why not get rid of rirni? But I wouldn't. In a Lojban-to-Lojban
dictionary you need other words of a similar meaning to craft a
definition.

> Infact, I can't believe there are gismu for some of the words. I would,
> for example (running finger down page) never had made "vinji"-airplane.
> Wouldn't varma'e be better? It is only one letter longer and saves
> people needing to learn that extra gismu.

Is a Zeppelin not also a varma'e? A hot air balloon? A helicopter? A
ski gondola? The General Lee (sometimes)? A better case could be made
for volmi'i but that still overlaps with helicopter.

I prefer gismu (+ tanru) to lujvo anyhow, for beginners it's easier to
look up a gismu than to deconstruct a lujvo, determine the rafsi and
then look up the gismu they represent. (Assuming the lujvo is not in
the dictionary, but when the literature starts to grow this will
happen.)

Someone with no prior contact with Lojban would be 100% bewildered by
the previous paragraph.

> BTW, xorxes: Vorlin looked interesting... until I discovered that the
> inventer created a whole new charactor ("crossed n") that doesn't even
> exist in the unicode character set. o'onairu'e

Actually Rick Harrison left the matter open to usage, suggesting a
unicode-ready alternative (eng) and an ISO 8859-1 alternative (mu),
both of equal value with the n+crossed tail. Harrison had aesthetic
concerns on his mind and sought to give Vorlin a feature unique unto
itself. He spoke positively of Esperanto's circumflexes and Volapuk's
umlauts. Harrison proposed a reform of Esperanto in which he didn't
touched the circumflexes.

Plus, with over a million unused codepoints in Unicode, the Standard
could one day contain the glyph, but Vorlin is on hold probably
forever.
-- 
Christopher Zervic, Esq.