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Re: [lojban] lujvo & tanru

At 06:50 AM 08/26/2000 -0400, David Twery wrote:

I think we do need some "common lujvo". The gismu themselves (individually)
are not adequate for a basic vocabulary. At the very least, tanru are
needed, and that's why lujvo are supposed to be coined -- to prevent adding
gismu *ad hoc* and *ad nauseam*.

(Sure, there's a case to be made for more gismu. Maybe about fifty. Maybe.
And not desperately.)

"Common" lujvo would have common sets of place structures, would be more
easily learned as language patterns, and would be easier to extend or
modify, requiring the dynamic skill you write about. The set of lujvo
composed of a SE lujvo plus the rafsi -- such as selkla, terkla, velkla, and
xemkla, from the places of klama -- is large, and easy to make "on the fly",
and extends the vocabulary to over 3000 brivla.

Using zma or mau (zmadu) as a "suffix" is like using "-er" in English to
augment something: bigger, greener, happier, etc. It's a common usage and
the place structure isn't too hard to figure out.

In the same way, -cau (claxu) is used for "-less", and -ske (saske) tends to
be used for "-ology".

So, what we need is not a set of cast-in-iron lujvo, but a set of both
usable lujvo *and lujvo-making patterns* that most Lojbanists can agree on,
that come from actual Lojban use and not forcing glico into a lojbo mold.
Might I suggest then that the first step in processing the *massive* lujvo file is to find all the words fitting these "easy" patterns, one pattern at a time, and then making keywords and place structures for them. I would presume that this would NOT take 10 minutes per lujvo, and might cut the pile of lujvo to be analyzed way down. 


Since you are using  lojban a lot in your conversation sessions, it would be
interesting if there was some way of keeping track of the tanru and/or lujvo
you use. If you found a certain one being used periodically, it would be a
good candidate for a lujvo. Recording and "deciphering" conversations may be
difficult to do, but it is one way of establishing what's "common" and what
isn't.
That is what the file of lujvo is for, with its frequency data. Thus far it is heavily dominated by the lujvo used by the 3 or 4 Lojbanists who post the most in Lojban. When I next update the file (probably in a couple of months), presumably a tendency to avoid lujvo in favor of tanru will result in only a small number of lujvo significantly increasing their frequency. 


This leads back to the bigger problem -- someone must achieve real fluency
in Lojban, the sooner the better.
I think Nick has such fluency, and perhaps Goran and Jorge and Michael as well, given their volumes of written text composed on a daily basis (and who knows who else). But whether they have fluency in quite the same language is not all that clear until they are called upon to interact with each other in real time. The last such attempt was at the Worldcon in Scotland when Nick first demonstrated fluency, but at that point no one was quite up to following him in real time (though Nick now seems to thinks that Goran was not far from that level of skill). 

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