Learning Lojban may be quite different an experience than learning a natlang (which is what the designers of Lojban themselves must have meant it to be so). When I started to study Lojban and try to grasp what Lojbanists were saying or had written on the internet, I realised that I needed more knowledge of those "little words" like {se} or {be} (which are quite representative of what you called the "basic functions" in Lojban) than knowledge of how to say "mountain" (the need of which I have rarely come across so far). I was more interested in those ubiquitous cmavo found in the actual Lojbanic conversations than in how to express "radio". Also, when I first visited the Lojban Wikipedia or tried to explore the Lojban version of
lojban.org for some reading exercise, I was instantly dismayed, because I couldn't comprehend the very navigation vocabularies themselves.
What I would expect from a language that claims to be easy to learn is, at least, not that it provides a list of words which are out of the actual & everyday usage in Lojbanistan and later disappoints me with the fact that what I have memorised from the list are actually not of great usefulness.
I'm not proposing a scheme to transform your list into something macho. My attention is: because for the most people the web is the prime resource for learning & exercising Lojban from the beginning, people would be perplexed and unhappy if they have memorised the meaning of {ckana} but cannot figure out what Lojbanists have actually written as basic indicational & navigational expressions on various lojbanic web materials. In the realm of the constructed languages, the importance of words like "passport" or "tomato" isn't necessarily of the utmost. People may be interested in how to say "tomato" in Lojban; but not everybody may. If that ("tomato") is what one would
personally like to express for whatever reason, it should suffice that he/she memorises that word from the gimste as a personal strategy. What they ought to be firstly
provided with, though, is a list of words which (a) they may not deftly predict to be important or which (b) they might not quickly nor accurately find out. The former refers to e.g. { mu'o }, and the latter e.g
. { mi na jimpe } which is already in your list. { mu'o } can always be found on ma'oste but most beginners may not be aware of its usefulness, so they have to be informed of it somehow
. { mi na jimpe } for beginners should obviously be an important _expression_ but hard to come up with since it's not on gimste, so there's a reason it has to be on your list.
> Is there anything less important we could drop?
> Does a beginner need much more?
>
> May I suggest that for every additional word someone
> proposes you also propose a word to be dropped from
> the list of 21? Okay?
>
> Could someone please sort out the Lojban equivalents
> for these 21 words?
Picking up them
from the terminology pages on
lojban.org should be easier. I would suggest these:
selcukta (document)
selsku (content with meaning = pictures, sounds, texts ...)
joncku (web page)
telckujo'e (links in a document)
ralju ckupau (main page / home)
sisku (search)
as well as these IRC phrases:
coi ro do (hi everybody)
co'o ro do (bye everybody)
doi + NAME (identifies intended listener)
.ua (discovery = Oh! / I see!)
.ua nai (confused = Huh? / Do tell!)
.ui (happy = :-) )
.ui nai (unhappy = :-( )
sai (attitudinal modifier: moderate intensity = very)
As to the 21, I would keep these:
e-mail/web address
username
password
login
message/comment
discussion/talk
It'd be also cool if every beginner knows these:
xu (Is ... true?)
ki'a (what is ...? / ... is what?)
po'u (which is ...)
ku'i (but/however ...)
mu'a (for example)
ta'o (by the way)
ke'o (please repeat what you've said)
.e (sumti connective = and)
gi'e (gismu connective = and)
vi / va / vu (location distance: short / medium / long)
zi / za / zu (time distance: shot / medium / long)
pu / ba (time interval: past / future)
Vid