Lindar wrote:
My absolutely fantastic idea that donri/kribacr started and never finished (or never even started, but definitely came up before I thought of it [but it's still my idea]) is/was/will be to have groups of people select topics, and then go through and come up with as many words related to that topic as possible. I got this idea one day as I was sticking masking tape to pretty much everything around my apartment and writing the Lojban word for it in sharpie. I came across the simple fact that jvs didn't have words for "pot", "kitchen", "frying pan", etc., so I came up with words for them, and I think at least "kitchen" (jupku'a) is up there. I tried this again with computer terminology and it completely failed as nobody could agree properly on things (like "window", on which I still harshly/ obnoxiously/rudely/insultingly disagree with xorxes). Rather than having one person sit through some big gehorsenshitfesten (parden my German) trying to pick out the most common concepts in the universe, why don't we use the wiki idea and create "conversational categories" under which we can place words (probably a lot of fu'ivla and lujvo) relevant to the topic. This will generate a much larger and relevant body of information, and it's a -much- less daunting task.
It sounds like you are essentially proposing continuing and adding to the thesaurus, with some minor variances for methodology
The problem is, and the reason we stopped working with thesauri, is that they really don't work well with a predicate language, and indeed I would go so far as to say that they are totally inconsistent with one.
It leads to people creating English "nouns" and "adjectives" which are one place predicates, and verbs which in English are usually simple on place predicates or two place predicates of a predictably malglico variety (the nominative-accusative bias that was discussed in another thread).
In a sufficiently specialized arena with words of all one semantic field (i.e. jargon), creating such non-Lojbanic fu'ivla would be no especial problem.
Making lujvo is kinda OK, but people need to focus on the place structures and not just on coming up with a Lojban word for each English word.
The closest thing we've seen to what is needed comes from the field of AI, and what I am describing may well be 10 years out of date in that field. This is the concept of "discourse frame". As I understand it, the collection of nouns, verbs, and adjectives needed to talk in a particular field of discourse are encoded in and defined in some manner showing how they interrelate with each other. When coded in LISP or another predicate-based knowledge representation language, these relationships are the sorts of things that should be represented as Lojban brivla.
Alas, that reaches the limits of my knowledge. People explained it to me in the 90s, but no one ever undertook applying it to the existing Lojban vocabulary, much less to the idea of using it to analytically expand the Lojban vocabulary. So we have no actual Lojbanic examples that I know of. But if you find someone who knows what I am talking about %^), and your project tackled areas of discourse in this way, I think it would meet your needs as well as those of the project.
Short version: Lojban words without place structures are just encoded English. Coming up with ways to massively expand the vocabulary AND to include place structures is not easy. But if people are willing to try to do both, go for it (in as systematic way as possible, so that you set examples and standards for later people who come along).
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