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[lojban] Re: Lojban-English full dictionary effort- request for assistance
Jon "Top Hat" Jones wrote:
I have been working on creating a full dictionary between English and
Lojban, excepting place names.
I'm using "Webster's New World Dictionary-Thesaurus" 2nd Edition,
(c)2002 to do this.
Basically, what I am doing is going through the book, and listing every
entry with it's various meanings, then ascribing the following:
1: a gismu/ tanru with equivalent meaning, as precise as possible
2: a lujvo if applicable, built from the tanru from (1)
3: a fu'ivla for those of who that like such things
When I have finished the "a"s, I will be formatting it into a
HTML-compatible table and posting it onto my geocities account, or the
Lojban wiki, or both(?).
1) as you describe it, you are asking for serious copyright trouble from
the dictionary publisher. I suggest you use a dictionary that is out-of
copyright and online. Then you avoid copyright issues and can use
software tools or editing tricks to save having to retype the whole
dictionary, which it sounds like you are proposing.
2) it falsely presumes that Lojban words will map exactly to English
definitions (the "equivalent meaning, as precise as possible"). It also
presumes that Lojban(ists) would necessarily WANT a lujvo for each
English meaning. Sometimes an English word will better map to a Lojban
phrase. Sometimes more than one Lojban word will map to a single
English definition based on contextual features not found in the English
definition.
3) it does not address place structures for the proposed words. Many
English words are represented by places of other Lojban words. Thus
klama represents origin, destination, route. One CAN represent these as
distinct words selkla, terkla, velkla, but only because the place
structure of klama is defined and stable. If you coin a lujvo without
determining its place structure, you miss out on the possibility that
sel[xxxxxx] might be the best lujvo for an English concept.
4) likely your project ends up being a form of encoded English. There
have been earlier efforts to build vocabulary systematically based on
Helen Eaton's multilingual concept list, which at least makes the
attempt to give weight to words in other languages.
5) The experience of those Eaton efforts should be instructive. It took
several people months to cover even 1000 concepts, and the results were
extremely controversial, with very few of them making it into actual
usage. JCB's original language attempted to cover the first 3000
concepts, but it actually took 25 years to get that far.
I suggest that you tackle the complete effort for just one page of your
dictionary (including having it reviewed by other Lojbanists) to have
some idea of the actual scope of what you are trying, before you invest
more time in typing in large quantities of dictionary definitions.
lojbab
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