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Re: [lojban] Contesting a lujvo
Thank you very much for the well structured and well thought out response.
I feel the need to point out, though, that you did not address my concern
about "atheism". I am aware of the source of ambiguity in the English
language, which would not be present in lojban; I chose "atheism" because it
is the least inflammatory example of which I could think.
With regard to your {ri'orcinki} solution, I can imagine a situation where
the dye-ers would use {ri'orcinki} for their insect and the new lujvo for
the other, and {so'a lo drata} wouldn't change their usage. I also expect
that {ri'orcinki} would be used to describe the particular insect and {crino
cinki} would be used to describe other green (in some way) insects, leading
to a "proper definition" along the lines of "An insect which appears green;
used by [group a] to describe [insect 1] and by [group b] to describe
[insect 2] exclusively."
2011/4/22 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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--
mu'o mi'e .arpis.
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