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Re: [lojban] Re: word for "www" (was: Archive location.)

At 10:40 AM 9/11/02 -0700, Robin Lee Powell wrote:

On Wed, Sep 11, 2002 at 02:20:09AM +0100, And Rosta wrote:
> Robin Lee Powell
> > On Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 11:00:03PM +0100, And Rosta wrote:
> > > Robin CA:
> > > > The whole *point* of lujvo, unless I'm missing something, is
> > > > that someone should be able to dissect them and figure out what
> > > > you mean.
> > >
> > > Not so. Lujvo are simply a means of creating new words for new
> > > meanings. However, other things being equal (e.g. word length), a
> > > candidate lujvo is held to be the more superior the more its
> > > meaning and place structure can be guessed from its constituent
> > > parts.
> >
> > I can't tell if you're agreeing with me or not.  8)
>
> Not. It is not the case that the whole point of lujvo is that someone
> should be able to dissect them and figure out what you mean. The whole
> point of lujvo is that they are words formed from parts that have
> independent meaning within Lojban, but with a meaning that is not
> equivalent to the sum of their parts. Their dissectablity is not their
> point.

OK.  What is their point?
Their point is to fix a single meaning from among the infinite number of possible tanru meanings, and to incorporate a fixed and unitary place structure (which tanru do not have, since the selbri place structure is that of the final word and other places are attached with be/bei), all of these things being associated with Zipfean shortening of expression for more common ideas (i.e. we would expect to make lujvo only for ideas that we expect will be reused often enough that shortening their expression is valuable enough to make us want to learn/figure-out what the intended place structure is).
The latter is the main reason for using a usage frequency filter in deciding which lujvo to define in the dictionary; greater usage justifies the Zipfean shortening. 

lojbab

--
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:                 http://www.lojban.org