From: djandus <jandew@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Fri, May 13, 2011 8:01:21 AM
Subject: Re: [lojban] Lojban Thinking
On Friday, May 13, 2011 7:16:22 AM UTC-5, xorxes wrote:
On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 5:11 AM, djandus <jan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I meant there wouldn't be as close of synonyms as in English. As far as I
> know, there aren't Lojban words with as close of meaning as "pretty" vs.
> "beautiful" or "hard" vs. "difficult"."nandu" vs "tolfrili"
> Also, I shifted in my mind, but did not write it, from thinking about
> dictionaries to thinking about speech in Lojbanistan. Thus, my example {ko'a
> melbi mi} was a good one, where I had in mind two people who know each
> other, and the definer points to something specifically pretty and makes his
> statement.
Assumung the pretty thing is in front of the speaker, how would you
tell whether the definer was defining
"melbi" or "crane"?
By another example, as I'd imagine learning new words as a beginner would always run for any language :)
But in general, yes, that's how people learn how to use most words in
any language, by imitating others.
> Anyway, if you could give me an example where a Lojban word is best defined
> with the aid of a synonym, that'd be extremely helpful to me.
There are many "tol"-pairs: lenku-tolglare, xlali-tolxamgu, cmalu-tolbarda, ...
Also there are "sel"- or "ter"-pairs: rirni-selpanzi, cpacu-tersabji, ...
Even if they are not always exact synonyms one can often help in
defining the other.
Then there's things like "jivbu" and "nivji" which seem almost synonymous to me.
Ah, but they are very different (to different people :P
)
(I don't actually know the difference, only that people who know it are very particular about it...)
mu'o mi'e xorxes
As for everything else, let me clarify a bit.
As far as I know, (once again) all of these lujvo examples are ones created on-the-fly, not explicitly defined. For that, they are extremely similar to their basic tanru counterparts in this case, at least in that forming the word did not take recalling a basic familiar word so much as forming a new description from distinct words.
Basically, what I'm saying is if someone asks for the meaning of {lenku}, and you give {tolglare}, it's a description, the polar opposite. Thanks to Lojban's system of lujvo and tanru, when someone asks for one lujvo's meaning, there's probably a good way
of describing it, purely with a selbri. When either person is interpreting this new combination, it's being interpreted by each individual part's meaning -- still completely different from giving "hard" as a synonym for "difficult". This is what I mean: Lojban makes describing things so simple and straightforward that we start doing it without even realize we're going through that effort. It's so simple to give {tolglare}, so obvious, but there is no other basic gismu that means the same thing as {lenku}. If there were, that would be a failure on Lojban's part. And I'm comparing this to things like "hard" vs. "difficult", to which I place no difference in meaning when I use them. In fact, the only reason I use "difficult" is because "hard" has two meanings, and I try to avoid that confusion. We even have defined the Lojban word for "difficult" with the gloss word "hard". They're two basic English words with the same usefulness in one respect, and when
you use one in one sentence, you're culturally pressured to use another in the next, to avoid repetitiveness. But do we ever pressure Lojbanists to use {tolglare} if they used {lenku} recently? This is the fundamental difference I'm trying to point out -- the natlangs I have used expect extremely similar synonyms for the vast majority of words. Not different in part of speech or anything, at most slightly nuanced in connotation and at worst merely colloquial. And then they expect the speaker to have them all on hand to swap freely between them arbitrarily. Lojban instead simply says "Here's a set of unique basic words, and the rules for pulling the nuances out of their meanings. Have a field day." And it just works.
As for fu'ivla, that doesn't count -- if you're borrowing a word from another language, then of course there's a synonym.
tl;dr
My restriction was on gismu and Lojban culture, not borrowed words
and descriptions.
My claim is that Lojban, lacking basic gismu synonyms for simplicity, makes it feel more natural to try to define words with useful descriptions or examples rather than first searching for a basic synonym.
I don't say that Lojban makes the descriptive or example process easier, it just cuts out that middle bit where you realize you already know a basic word for that.
-djandus
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