[lojban] Re: emotions

[Jorge "Llambías" <jjllambias2000@yahoo.com.ar>]

la lojbab cusku di'e

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

One can always settle for "learning the official gismu list". I would
not recomend that as a goal, though. It is much easier, I think, to learn 
them as needed through usage. 

> 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.

This is probably true, if you use that method of learning rafsi, but you
are the only person I have heard saying they learn them that way. For me
rafsi are the hardest things to learn in the language. Except for the
few that are used very often, I have not learned very many yet, even after
several years of not insignificant usage. For most gismu, I can't tell
what their rafsi is, or even whether they have short rafsi.

> 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).

Well, it seems that lack of debate won't be a problem in this case.

> 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.

Even so, there were some gaps left. For example, one that came up
recently on the list:

tirna sance
viska jvinu
sumne panci
pencu tengu
????? vrusi

As for usability in lujvo, one that I've often missed is something
correponding to Esperanto -inda, "deserving of". 

> 5.  Words made from one language, as parji was, should be fu'ivla. 

The "ji" part seems like it could be from Chinese, but I wouldn't 
really know. English-only would have given 'parsi', no? 

> 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 goal was sort of defeated by the English keyword list. People
learn the keywords to the point that they sometimes use the wrong
place structure because of a misleading keyword.

>  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.

And that's about the whole list, isn't it? It seems like you are making
the issue seem far bigger than it really is. Even if all the experimental
gismu from the wiki were transferred to jbovlaste, I don't think they are
more than 50, and almost all of them are cultural words. A few words like
mango, pitsa or taksi have a special status in that they are international
_and_ are already gismu-form without any need of adaptation. It is hard 
to resist those, since they don't even need a dictionary definition in order 
to be understood. I'm sure those will end up as part of the language in 
any case.  

> 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.

Unexpected = bad ?
 
> 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.

I agree. Not only for gismu, but also for lujvo and fu'ivla. They should
not be added willy-nilly and without due consideration. Especially so in
the case of gismu forms.

> 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.

The members will have to realize at some point that the language will
belong more and more to the users than to the members.

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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