On Tuesday, January 7, 2003, at 12:05 PM, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
Perhaps Maori does not have the concept of a file folder. Anybody who lives in a modern industrial state must deal with files.On Tue, Jan 07, 2003 at 11:57:21AM -0600, Steven Belknap wrote:The use of the lojban word <dacru> for a computer file is not malglico. The analogy of computer file to a paper file is a language-independent extension of the concept of file to cyberspace.That is *such* incredible crap. There are hundreds of languages that don't even have the *concept* of a file folder.
On my Mac there is a *sliding drawer* which I click on to see my files of email messages. Not all physical file holders are sliding compartments. My reading of the definition is that the brackets around "sliding compartment" denote a typical instance of a <dacru>, but do not necessarily restrict the meaning of the word to physical drawers with sliding compartments.And dacru isn't a file in that sense anyways, it's a drawer. A *physical* drawer. A *sliding* *compartment*, for crying out loud.
"record" and "file" are useful English terms precisely because they distinguish two levels of abstraction about the organization of information. Do you have any Microsoft Word files on your computer? If so, some of your files contain records. Your approach would conflate these two levels of abstraction, to the detriment of clear expression of an idea.Umm, BS. Unless you're defining record as an ASCII character or<vreji> is not an apt lojban word for file. A file *contains* records.
something, I assure you, the vast majority of my files do not, in fact,
contain records. They are records (i.e. permanent-ish storage) of data.