response to

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@GREBYN.COM>]

Well, a quick check of the dictionary says that periodontics refers to
the gums, bone, connective tissue 'surrounding' the teeth, and this is
indeed what the etymology means too.  The concept is either de'isru or
denvanbi.  There are arguments for both.  I would go for the former as a
slightly shorter word, and also a closer loan-translation.  So the
doctor is a de'isrumikce (5 syllables, just like the English.  Not bad!)

Nora suggested denterjo'e (tooth-joint).  There is also densai
(tooth-support), and molre'u (mouth-flesh).  Plenty of choices.

>A quick scan of the gismu list gives me 'coffee' & 'millet' but not
>'pepper' & 'gum'.  Why would coffee be a root word of more importance
>than pepper?  The list is very ad-hoc, and when I try to convert my
>everyday experiences into lojban I find great difficulty.  (The other
>day I went to a periodontist (gum-tooth-doctor, or maybe
>gum-mouth-doctor, but most definitely gum-doctor) - perhaps
>inner-mouth-flesh (nermolre'u) leaving us with nermolre'u mikce or
>nermolre'u denmikce).

If you live in a culture where millet is the staple grain instead of
wheat, and you are a farmer (as a larger percentage of such people are)
you might find the word more useful than you do in the USA.  I suspect
that USAns talk about wheat, rice, oats, etc. even in urban societies,
more than they talk about periodontics.

>The two points I am trying to make are 1) There does not seem to be any
>cohesive reasoning behind giving things gismu & not.  My conception of a
>logical language (which may be very different from yours - although many
>of the lojban grammar constructs are logical - just not the root words
>chosen) would be that the words chosen as roots are words that when you
>look up in the dictionary reference only themselves.  Certainly an onion
>is a plant is a living thing is a chemical process, but where do you
>draw the line?  If you can't possibly fit all plants into your gismu
>list why does onion fit?  And isn't saying 'more usage' not only wrong
>but euro-centric?

The list of gismu probably have some European biases because there is
more documentation on 'basic concepts
' of the European languages than of
other langauges, but we have taken some steps to counter such biases.
But the bottom line is that the gismu were not selected in any neat
systematic manner, and there probably isn't a very good algorithm for
determining what words are needed.  The set you have at time a tends to
push you towards a new set at time b, because you notice holes that seem
of particular import.  In our case we started with JCB's list of 1986,
which was derived from a 1984 list, which was derived from a 1975 list
and so on into Loglan prehistory (since JCB has poorly documented the
first 20 years of the project.)  He wrote a paper on how the initial set
of words were selected, but it doesn't tell the source of each word.

In addition, there have been the at-least-four competing goals for the
gismu list - to be a list of 'roots' or primitive concepts, to be a list
of the most common or useful concepts, to be a philosophically
analytical set of concepts to divide semantic space, and a set of
productive components for making as many lujvo as possible since only a
small fraction of the vocabulary can ever be covered by gismu.  Each of
these goals has a certain amount of cultural-dependency - what is useful
in the USA is not necessarily in the Sahara desert or the Tibetan
plateau.  JCB believes that there are culture independent primitive
concepts and some of the gismu are the set that he came up with, but
different scholars would come up with different lists, and different
philosophers can and have mapped semantic space differently.

The bottom line is that there are only 1300-odd gismu, and to talk about
gums, periodontists, and computer registers, you need a vocabulary of
50000 or more (probably much more given the Lojban ideal of one word per
meaning).  When we have 50,000 words in a dictionary, you won't notice
the glaring holes as easily, even if you still (as I believe, unlike
Cowan) recognize thet special significance of the gismu due to their
role in word-making and their unique form.  This is why Lojban needs
pioneers to make the words - the megabytes of Lojban text that have been
generated seem to reduce to no more than 6000 or so words, including
gismu, lujvo, cmavo, and le'avla, and possibly a good bit less.  I'd
love the first English-Lojban dictionary to cover 10,000 English words,
but we're nowhere near that total right now, and 5,000 is a better
figure.

BTW, there are a lot of non-cooks in society who wouldn't know if their
dinner last night had pepper in it, but they sure can't do without their
morning coffee.  I know this and I don't drink the stuff.

>Problem 2) is that I see that this language is in no way living and
>viable, and Zipf and a billion other demons will destroy it.  One can
>imagine your six year old saying to you 'pa klama' instead of 'patfu
>klama' very easily.
>
>Is it that a structured language such as lojban can never obtain the
>status of a natural language, while a language which imitates natural
>languages such as esperanto might be able to?

My kids (5 and 7), who speak fluent Russian and aren't too bad in
English according to more neutral observers, do that kind of thing in
English all the time, and they occasionally do it in Russian too.  We
learn natural languages because tfo the corrective norms of everyone
elses usage.  If a kid says "pa klama" when they should say "patfu
klama", they will be either corrected, or mis-understood (or perhaps
simply NOT understood), or possibly (good pedagogy these days with
younger kids) you worry about understanding now, and correct their
grammar only occasionally until they get older because they won't learn
from correction very quickly at that age - they learn instead from
having lots of correct models, which they emulate.

I see nothing that Esperanto has going for it over Lojban except the n
Esperanto speakers (where n is larger than the number of Lojban
speakers, whatever the value is) and the body of esperanto text, both of
which serve as a source of 'good language' for others to learn from.
Esperanto was new 100 years ago, and I suspect for most people was
pretty much as hard as Lojban is now, especially when you want a word
not in the dictionary.  I think Nick or someone told me that it took
some 17 years after the first Esperanto book came out in 1887 before the
international Esperanto gatherings were able to sustain spontaneous
conversation to a degree needed to support their international
gatherings.  We don't even have any books out yet, but the IRC effort at
LogFest between Nick and many here suggest that we shouldn't take that
long.

Of course we aren't competing with Esperanto anyway.  It has its
purposes and its adherents, many of whom are also Lojbanists.  If Lojban
succeeds, it won't be merely because it is another contender for 'the
International Language'.

lojbab