[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
RE: [lojban] Re: emotions
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