Another example of this kind of snowballing thing. {xalka}. I've seen it used a few times and so have used it myself in places like {.ui mi pinxe lo mutce xalka .uisai}, completely unaware of the existence of {jikru} which seems far more appropriate in most circumstances.
On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 2:32 AM, Stela Selckiku
<selckiku@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 7:23 PM, Luke Bergen <lukeabergen@gmail.com> wrote:
> Which brings up another point. How acceptable
> are "mistakes" in lojban? I know I abuse English
> in all kinds of not-technically-correct ways.
I think they're slightly more acceptable than they used to be. The
problem is that Lojban is such a young language. At first, a few
years back, every time a word was used was one of the first times that
word had ever been used. We were trying to set Lojban off on the
right foot, to do things properly, because we knew later usage would
imitate the earliest usage. Now most words have a little bit of
history to them, and there's a lot of us who know something about what
we're doing and have some understanding of a lot of the language. Now
Lojban isn't quite as likely to be confused and sent astray by a
single badly chosen word. But it's still relatively easy to confuse,
certainly compared with a giant language like English; nothing I say
in this sentence can make any substantial alteration in the course of
English. Lojban is young enough it could still be confused into
imitating unlojbanic patterns if they're repeated a few times, or
appear somewhere prominent; witness the recent snowballing effect of
the one word "roldei" appearing on a Twitter account many of us pay
attention to.
Context is everything. Private conversations are less important to
get perfect than public conversations, which are less important to get
perfect than published documents or prominent names and titles. Words
and structures that have been used less are also more fragile than
those we use all the time. There's still a surprising amount of the
gismu list (for instance) that's very rarely been used at all, and
we're all liable to imitate the first times we see those gismu places
used. For instance "bilni" supposedly can mean "is strongly
organized", but I've never yet seen such a use, nor much of any use of
"bilni" at all, and you could probably radically alter my
understanding of "bilni" with a well placed sentence. I'm probably
altering our understanding of "bilni" right now just by this oblique
reference! OTOH I'd say you can be quite casual with "klama", as it
would take a lot for you to be able to alter my understanding of it
after the thousands of times I've already encountered it.
mi'e .telselkik. mu'o
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