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[lojban] Re: [bpfk] Technical, Help Request: What information *should* a Lojban dictionary system have?
Robin Lee Powell wrote:
Much more interesting to me is the back-end data: What sorts of
things *should* a Lojbanic dictionary store, ideally?
What got this started is the realization that Lojban isn't English,
and that, in particular, the brivla definitions seem anti-Lojbanic.
When I see
x1 gets/procures/acquires/obtains/accepts x2 from source x3
that kind of looks to me like a verb; I see the big thing in the
middle as being "the meaning" of "the verb".
Lojban isn't like that: brivla are as much or more about the
*places* than about the central meaning-concept.
This lead to me wondering what a definition format that really
focused on the places would look like; I don't really have an answer
yet, but this in turn lead to a lot of other stuff.
A lot of thought, as well as research on dictionary writing went into
the format I used, which is what appears above. The decisive factor
that led to the above was brevity (which is a factor in most
dictionaries that see print)
If people are ONLY going to look at dictionaries on-line, then brevity
may be less important, but if there is ever to be a printed (or
printable) dictionary, with a significant number of entries, something
like the above becomes necessary.
Another thing to remember - while Lojban isn't English, until we get to
Lojban-only dictionaries, all dictionaries are translation dictionaries,
and there are very different rules because of how such dictionaries are
used. There, the key to format is the target language - the one in
which people will be focused on when translating. One would therefore
expect a different format for the English-to-Lojban side than for the
Lojban-to-English side. I tried for this in the quasi-automated
dictionary format, which used keyword manipulation to turn the above
into a series of entries like:
procurer: x1 of cpacu; (followed by some form of the definition above)
acquirer: x1 of cpacu; (followed by some form of the definition above)
obtainer: x1 of cpacu; ...
accepter: x1 of cpacu; ...
acquisition: x2 of cpacu ...
source of acquisition: x3 of cpacu ...
acquisition: nu event of cpacu ...
acquisition: nu event of cpacu ...
acquisition: pu'u process of cpacu ...
get : x1+x2 of cpacu ... (meaning that at least those two places must be
filled in order to translate the English)
etc.
This turns each lojban-to-English definition into a rich multitude of
English to Lojban definitions. It can take a lot of work, even with
something like Cowan's perl script that did the keyword manipulation,
and you have to think about which keywords are likely to useful.
lojban.org should have the files I generated doing this work somewhere,
so people can see what the result looked like. It wasn't necessarily
all that pretty, but it met the functional need. And the automated
processing made it possible to create a dictionary in less than several
lifetimes.
I won't pretend to know how to apply these insights into online
dictionaries, since the only kind I ever use are those that display
entries looking like regular English entries (a formatting style that
developed over a couple hundred years of dictionary writing).
lojbab
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