Re: [lojban] Contesting a lujvo

[tijlan <jbotijlan@gmail.com>]

On 21 April 2011 11:49, .arpis. <rpglover64+jbobau@gmail.com> wrote:
> Under your solution, {ri'orcinki} would mean
> effectively the same thing as {crino cinki}, leaving the two parties with
> words longer by a syllable.

In Lojban, "more syllables" usually coincides with "more information".
And it would have been because of a lack of morphological specificity
that {ri'orcinki} became a point of contention over multiple meanings
that are more specific than "insects that are related to green color".
Morphological particularization by adding a rafsi / syllable for each
contesting definitions would be a fair solution, in my opinion.


> If the dye-ers were willing to go with a longer
> lujvo, the contest probably wouldn't have happened in the first place.

The contest would still be meaningfully constructive if it resulted in
{ri'orcinki} itself becoming more generic than "insects with green
body" and in the creation of two new more specific lujvos to meet the
claimed lexical demand. The issue with the ambiguity or semantic
partiality of the former shorter lujvo gets resolved, and people get
to speak more accurately with the latter longer lujvos. If the dye-ers
wanted more than this fair game, that would be another case for them
to make, i.e. to justify their claim that "insects that produce a
green dye" is *more* important / basic a concept than "insects with
green body", demonstrating the right to {ri'orcinki} that's
morphologically more basic than {ri'opracinki}.


> As another example, currently {sampla} refers to the relationship "some
> programmer writing a computer program that does something".
>
> But come the singularity, {skami platu} may be used more frequently to refer
> to plans made by a computer, not for a computer; the meaning of the lujvo
> {sampla} might become increasingly archaic, and there may be a push to adopt
> the meaning "some computer wrote some plan/design to do something".
> [...]
> I mean that the distinction over whether the programmer
> is human or computer may become more important than the distinction over
> whether the intended consumer is human or computer, prompting a possibility
> for drift.

That could again be a matter of particularization. To begin with:

"made by computer" -- sampra
"made by human" -- rempra
"used by computer" -- sampli
"used by human" -- rempli

With these, we could have:

samprapla -- "plan made by computer"
remprapla -- "plan made by human"
samplipla -- "plan used by computer"
remplipla -- "plan used by human"
sampraremplipla -- "plan made by computer and used by human"

and so on. {sampraremplipla} may look relatively mouthful in the
traditional Lojban lexicon, but 5-syllable is no longer than "computer
program" (5) or, say, "コンピュータプログラム" (kon-pyuu-ta-pu-ro-gu-ra-mu, 8 --
a common Japanese word for "computer program"), both of which are yet
less specific than the particularized jbovla (as I said, Lojban has a
helpful low information-per-syllable ratio).

Then what to do with {sampla}? As with {ci'orcinki}, we could make it
so generic as to include the newly created lujvos, to mean "plan that
has to do with computer". It would likely go out of use in general
contexts because of its vagueness, but convenient where the specific
kind of computer-related plans that are at stake can be understood
from context and when the speaker yet wants to save on syllables.

In my opinion, the vocabulary development in a logical and "neutral"
language ought to incorporate dialectic: one shows how the
conventional definition of the word in question would bear a
contradiction or incompleteness if it excluded the proposed new
meaning, i.e. showing the need for the word to sublate (to lift up),
preserving in itself all the legitimately contesting meanings. This
would at the same time help clarify the hierarchical relations between
the wanted meanings and suggest the specificities to be explicit for
each meaning's to-be-created lujvo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic


> Another (more painful issue) is who decides what a term applying to a group
> of people means: e.g. atheists tend to define "atheism" as a lack of belief
> in any god, while people who don't identify as atheist tend to define
> "atheism" as a disbelief in (usually the Abrahamic) god.

The conflicting interpretations of the word "atheism" may be
ascribable to the ambiguity of what "a-" ("without") modifies within
the word:

[a-the(os)]-ism --> "without-god" belief --> belief in non-reality of
god (positive atheism)
a-[the(os)-ism] --> without "god-belief" --> no belief in reality of
god (negative atheism)

These can easily be differentiated in Lojban with "ke(m)" or "bo(r)":

[nar-bor-cei]-si'o
nar-[kem-cei-si'o]

(One could also argue that some forms of theism are not a belief in
the existence of a supernatural personal being or beings, such as
pantheism and panentheism where "god" is recognized more often as a
result of qualitative evaluation of the empirical reality within the
naturalistic framework. For that reason, we would be wise to keep the
{-cei-} part so generic unless particularized by additional rafsi.)


mu'o

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