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Re: junta [was: Re: [lojban] selma'o considered harmful
At 09:44 PM 8/15/01 +0000, Jorge Llambias wrote:
la maikl cusku di'e
>maybe it's because we talk about weight as well as mass, the former being
>more important for everyday speech, but the latter being more
>fundamental.
That would explain why there is a word for weight instead
of one for mass, but it doesn't explain why there is a
word for either one of them at all. Other properties like
size, length, etc. didn't get a special word.
I believe it was indeed included because of the weight/mass distinction
(with mass being ni marji, IIRC). Most of the other things that can be
measured are not subject to this potential confusion, and were presumed to
be expressible as ni abstractions, or klani/tergradu. I specifically aimed
to cover all the major SI units with words for both the unit and the thing
measured, but the latter method usually worked. junta could have been ni
tilju, but I remembered how easily lay people confuse mass and weight and
left junta in for Zipfean reasons.
BTW, noting that Lojban defaults to using SI units in measurement, I
intended that you can express such messes as g m/sec**2 (newton?) as lujvo
based on such tanru as ni bapli [kei] gradu and acceleration as ni sutra
cenba [kei] gradu.
This seemed better than JCB's approach, which in 1986-7 included adding
gismu for "volt" and other commonly used units, though those additions seem
not to have made it into his revised Loglan 1 gismu list.
lojbab
--
lojbab lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org