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[lojban-beginners] Re: dicussions about basic vocabulary

It's important to remember that Lojban is an engineered language. Its lexicon has been designed to be simple yet highly potential for further making up words so that the learners don't need a thousand-paged dictionary to expand their own lexical horizon. The number of the root words in Lojban is relatively adequate. I have printed them out for myself. 22 pages. Not so many. They are already "basic" in nature. Toki Pona is even simpler than Lojban but therefore has to rely heavily on longer compound words to say even something like "ear" (BTW "ear" and "anus" share the word "lupa" because they share the property "hole"!), and eventually it becomes so wordy and impracticable if you do describe any complex matters.

Martin's project can be viewed as a further condensed list of what are already basic words. And I'm willing to support it. But there's a thing I've noted about the criterion of the listing: It looks somewhat stereotypic and not sufficiently accommodating the actual needs of Lojban beginners. For example, I would've liked to know what the word for "password" rather than "passport". There's probably no single immigration officer in any country who would ask you in Lojban to produce a proof of your nationality, but there could exist web sites which would ask you in Lojban to enter your password. Likewise, the word for "the internet" would probably be more useful than "radio" in Lojbanistan, or "web page" rather than "book", "button (to click)" rather than "pen".

If we consider the obvious possibility that Lojbanistan is going to further develop with its hub being primarily online collective communications (e.g. lojban.org, Wikipedia), we might as well prioritize those internet-related vocabularies so that the beginners can quickly adapt, from the very early stage of learning, to the most active space of the community. (Some of the terms are suggested on  http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Lojban+web-related+terminology&bl)


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