[lojban] Re: jbovlaste natlang word voting question

[Robin Lee Powell <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

On Sun, May 13, 2007 at 04:08:35PM +0200, Arnt Richard Johansen
wrote:
> On Sat, May 12, 2007 at 08:55:39PM -0700, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> > 
> > Someone pointed out that you couldn't acutally derive that
> > second place of sampli from its components, so I've corrected
> > that.  Try http://jbovlaste.lojban.org/natlang/en/ball instead
> > for an example of multiple natlang usages; if the dictionary
> > said something like "ball - first place of bolci, second place
> > of selboi", would that be a bad thing?
> 
> _In this particular case_ it would be a bad thing, because if we
> already know that ball is the first place of bolci, then it is
> kinda sorta tautological that it is the second place of selboi.

There I definately disagree, because I'm an a fairly unique
situation: my Lojban blog posts (http://camgusmis.livejournal.com/)
get read by someone who doesn't know a bit of Lojban, and would find
that not obvious in any way.  It's her I tend to think about WRT
dictionary design.

> But I do think it is a good idea to have the _possibility_ of
> multiple Lojban word for one natlang word. A good example of why
> this is necessary is:
> 
> http://jbovlaste.lojban.org/natlang/en/science fiction
> 
> Here, there are two "live" definitions for "science fiction". More
> are still languishing in Noralujv. All are subtly different, and
> should be pointed to by the natlang entry for "science fiction".
> But it does not make sense to split "science fiction" into
> different senses, because it's not really polysemous.

(Devil's advocate) You could distinguish this with "science fiction;
science based" and "science fiction; technology based".  Is there a
reason to avoid that?

-Robin

-- 
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