[lojban] Re: Philosophical differences.

[Stela Selckiku <selckiku@gmail.com>]

mi'e la selckiku


On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 8:46 AM, Lindar
Greenwood<lindarthebard@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> 1. vlagi


I wouldn't have made a gismu for vlagi, not because vlagi aren't
important, but because it's not especially productive of lujvo.
That's a much deeper sin of the gismu list: It completely conflates
the purposes of creating a basic vocabulary and creating a library of
combining forms, and thus does both terribly.

The word exists though, not just in old vocabulary lists but in a lot
of human brains.  This conversation is only spreading it to more.  I
don't see how you could wage a successful campaign against it.


> There is absolutely no way to describe "sleepy",


There's no way to get to much of anything worthwhile by uncolored,
arithmatic addition of gismu meanings.  That's why lujvo are allowed
to have their own characters, derived from nowhere except whim.  Lujvo
have new meanings.  Their constituent gismu are mnenomic hints to that
meaning, or vague guideposts to the uninitiated.  The full meaning is
not derivable from them.

Lojban already has various words, "tatpi" and "siptcu" and "sipydji"
and so forth, which could translate "sleepy" in various senses.  Based
on the usage I've seen, the word which would usually most closely
translate "sleepy" would be "sipydji"-- which I agree relates somewhat
strangely to "djica", but on the other hand it is a gorgeous
*sounding* word, which I would guess factors into its popularity.

It's true of course that the gismu don't necessarily provide a very
*good* set of mnenomics.  There could be a lot more choices than -tcu
and -dji, but instead what we have is a lot of words for household
objects and body parts and wtf-ever.  What I propose broadly to
respond to this (utterly unfixable) overall situation is what I have
called "cimjvo", cilmo zei lujvo, moist lujvo, lujvo which are wet
with meaning, or to put it more concretely: lujvo with an elided
"-pev-".  (The lujvo "cimjvo" is of course self-describing, for
instance.)

I think it would be a good idea to use the flavored words we have for
various specific needs, like taske and xagji, as additional bases for
families of words about wanting and needing.  We don't need a full
family of lujvo for different kinds of actual non-metaphorical thirst!
 In theory that sounds cool, but I am having trouble even thinking of
more than one type of thirst.  Um za'e mlitaske vs za'e tcetaske, but
that hardly counts.  Uh how about za'e xaltaske.  I'm a little za'e
jisrytaske right now?!  So, as I've just demonstrated, either -taske
can be metaphorical, or it's only for making words that are very
silly. :)


> 3. Cultural gismu.
>
> Just fix it already.


The gismu can't be scrubbed out of existence.  It's not like we can so
thoroughly get rid of "merko" that we could go ahead and make a new
word "merko" that means something else.  But we could make them less
used, if there were well-known cultural fu'ivla for the cultures we
usually use gismu for.  I still use "merko" because I don't know of
any potential replacements that anyone would recognize.  I'm willing
to champion new cultural fu'ivla, if someone comes up with good ones,
but it will take some time.  Fighting the established gismu when
there's not yet a replacement won't help at all.


> 4. Computer words.
>
> Face it, we're pretty much all huge nerds. We need words for "window",
> "website", "internet", "software", "hardware", and various other things. We
> have computer and monitor, but not much else, and if we are to put this
> language into full use as quickly as possible, I see this as a dire
> necessity over most anything else.


There have been a lot of words for internet.  I think the ones I've
seen most often are probably "samseltcana" (clear enough, but I'd
think it would mean "network" in general) and "samclupa" (which seems
really weird to me, but it's out there).  There are some old words for
website that I forget.  Oh I remember an old fu'ivla for web,
"skamrxuebe" or something.  There's a few words about programming,
like sampla, samselpla, sambau.  Recently in a conversation I had with
Daniel one of us came up with "samsmacu", mouse.  Of course we could
use a lot more.  What you got?  Hit us! :)


mu'o


To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to lojban-list-request@lojban.org
with the subject unsubscribe, or go to http://www.lojban.org/lsg2/, or if
you're really stuck, send mail to secretary@lojban.org for help.