RE: [lojban] Re: emotions

[Robert LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>]

At 10:30 AM 5/26/03 -0400, Robert LeChevalier wrote:
>JCB had the habit in the 70s of coining a new gismu that seemed useful at
>the moment, but which really had no justification as a root word in the
>language.  Thus TLI Loglan has gismu for "olive", "football" (ambiguously
>never defined as to whether he meant this to be soccer or American rugby),
>sodium, beefsteak, and billiards.  All of these should have been lujvo, or
>fu'ivla if there was no obvious lujvo.  But in the 70s, there was no
>distinct fu'ivla form, so borrowings were in the morphological form of
>gismu and lujvo.
>
>I'm fighting the recurrence of this bad habit.

First of all, Nora notes that sodium is still a gismu (sheepish grin), 
though our reason was different.

Nora adds several arguments against ad hoc expansion of the gismu list by 
simple addition to jbovlaste, which I summarize.

1. every added gismu makes the goal of "learning the gismu list", a worthy 
goal for new Lojbanists, that much harder

2. every added gismu makes the goal of learning rafsi (or deducing their 
meaning) that much harder.  Assume that parji is added even with no rafsi 
assigned.  Because it is there, then when you see rafsi paj, par, pai, or 
pa'i, or even pra, then this is one more gismu that they MIGHT be, and 
hence a little harder to learn.

3. all of the gismu added, whether people agree they should be or not, went 
through a certain amount of debate before we even made a gismu for 
them.  The sheer necessity of looking up a word in 6 languages means that 
we had to consider the meaning carefully, so we'd know what to look up, and 
there were at least three of us involved in looking up words, so we 
therefore always debated  (and Tommy and I had MANY long debates, since he 
was a gismu minimalist - as few as possible).

4. Once we got past the basic start of analyzing, weeding, and redoing the 
TLI Loglan list words, words were added only with a careful consideration 
of a)semantic completeness (e.g. of sets of food-grains), b) usability in 
lujvo to cover semantic space.  New words should have to be justified in 
terms of necessity AS GISMU.

5.  Words made from one language, as parji was, should be fu'ivla.  Whether 
people think there is a lot of meaning to the 6-language word-making, it 
offers a couple of things: an objective way to decide the "best form", 
dissociation of the word from the keyword in any single source language, so 
that it is less likely to be encoded English (or whatever language).  This 
is also why fu'ivla should be dispreferred when one can make a lujvo:  a 
lujvo has its own lojbanic meaning, whereas a fu'ivla starts with the 
meaning in some other language and is not really lojbanic.  lujvo-making 
forces you to think about meaning, and jvajvo force you to think about 
place structures (whether you choose to follow jvojva or not, considering 
them is a good idea).
         Nora looked up other experimental gismu in jbovlaste, and points 
out that even more than parji, "mango" has no business as a gismu, and 
benzo is almost as questionable.

6. (hard to explain) the list of existing gismu slants the choice of how 
one makes and interprets lujvo.  The semantics of the language is based on 
what has gone before.  Adding a new gismu to the coverage of semantic space 
changes the semantic map, and thus could change the color of meaning of 
other words in unexpected ways.

7.  Without disparaging the contributions of new people to the language, 
there is a tendency of many new people to, early in their Lojbanic career, 
say "it would have been better to do it 'this way'" without fully 
understanding the reasons why it was done 'the other way', so they advocate 
for change without learning the language as it is.  Without baseline 
controls, the momentum of LOTS of usage, and a dictionary with words of all 
varieties so that people can find most of the words they want without 
inventing them, coining new gismu for every concept they want to say, is 
natural.  I myself am guilty of this, with my favorite "pitsa", but I would 
never argue for adding it to the gismu list because I know better (and I 
don't really care to make more gismu for pepperoni, sausage, peppers, ham, 
and pineapple %^)
         If it is "easy" to add words without thinking about meanings, 
place structures, people will do so.  I contend that, for gismu, this is 
NOT a good thing.

8. Finally, before there was a byfy, adding gismu to the original baseline 
list was consider fundamental enough that each one was put to a membership 
vote (at LogFest).  People were expected to make a case for their word and 
submit it for consideration by the members, and to abide by the 
result.  Hence I abided by the elimination of gumri.  The current method of 
putting words out there, and having them see usage without the debate, 
without the research, without the discussion, and without abiding by what 
was decided in the past, is disparaging of stability, tradition, and the 
opinions of members who put time and effort into the language in the past.

lojbab

-- 
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                    703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:                 http://www.lojban.org



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