John E Clifford wrote:
Hell, list 'em all, with cross references to the fullest form, where all the details are spelled out.----- Original Message ---- From: Mark E. Shoulson <mark@kli.org> To: lojban@googlegroups.com Sent: Sun, February 6, 2011 6:02:44 PM Subject: Re: [lojban] [non]Dictionary form of lujvo On 02/06/2011 04:46 PM, Pierre Abbat wrote:On Sunday 06 February 2011 16:02:10 Alex Rozenshteyn wrote:For example, I like {tolcliva} better than I like {tolyli'a}. Is there a convention stating that I should use the latter?There's a convention saying that each form gets a score and the scores determine which one is the canonical form. All the forms are equally valid; I prefer "tolcliva" too. I once used "ci'onrai" for scansion reasons. PierreIMO, for a true "dictionary" form, one it's filed under alphabetically, you should use the fully expanded form, with all rafsi in 4- or 5-letter form... which doesn't apply here, since cmavo don't have 4-letter rafsi. But in general with gismu. So ci'onrai would be citnytraji~mark
My intent for the original concept of the Lojban dictionary (or what it is worth), was to list the canonical form first, and then follow it, probably in parens, with other forms that have seen actual usage. If any of these other forms had seen MORE usage than the canonical form, then they would get a separate entry with definition, but with cross-reference to the canonical form, in the first dictionary. Then if usage continued to favor this form over the canonical one, then a later edition of the dictionary would make the cross-reference in the other direction, indicating that the alternate form was preferred in usage to the canonical one.
Page count in a printed dictionary is a vital consideration. No one is likely to want to carry a me la uebstr around with them, even if they could afford to buy it. And I was hoping and even expecting more words rather than more forms of fewer words, after seeing what had already been used in Lojban text (see the noralujv file/project).
I was ambivalently considering having the expanded-form listed as a separate entry, but without definition, or with only a keyword definition, and a cross-reference to the canonical or preferred form. Whether to include these or not would have probably been primarily determined by the page count. For on-line lookups, including long-forms is fine (and gives someone the choice between looking up using long-form, probably typical for someone who has coined a lujvo and wants to see if it has already been used or defined, and isn't certain of how to figure the canonical form, and looking up the canonical form which is the form we would expect to see most used in text for words that have seen significant usage). But the page count issue was even from the beginning militating against multiple forms in a printed dictionary.
In an only-online format, including other forms, even "all of them" as pc suggests, is plausible ONLY if the other-form entries are all automagically generated from one of the two forms I had intended to consider. By the time you get to 4 part lujvo, the number of forms can be enormous.
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