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[lojban] Category theory in lojban, or coining words
I'm "studying" category theory (la .cev. a'o mi sidju). More precisely, I'm sitting in a seminar with some friends of mine who have a slightly firmer grasp of the material and going through a textbook.
I'm wondering how one would have gone about coming up with the vocabulary for category theory in lojban (alternatively, but not quite equivalently, how one would translate the English terms to lojban, preserving some important properties of the words).
Some of the terms (e.g. "product", "sum") have precise and well-defined meanings that are the same as other branches of mathematics, but more general than the homonyms defined over numbers. The difficulty in these terms is not specific to category theory, and probably just requires someone (or a group of someones) with an intimate knowledge of many branches of mathematics to come up with good (or good enough, or standard) lojban words for the generic concepts.
The difficulty lies in these other two classes of terms:
The terms in the first class are semantically mnemonic and metaphorical, but precise (so pe'a and -pev- are not quite what's desired), two good examples of which are "tree" and "tournament" from graph theory.
The second class consists of terms that are morphologically mnemonic (e.g. "functor", "epimorphism"/"epic morphism", "monomorphism"/"monic morphism", "endomorphism", "equalizer").
How would one (or the community) go about coining words for these terms? They don't seem to deserve their own gismu; it seems like any lujvo they are given will either take up space that is more useful for something else, isn't mnemonic (which can be very important), or is too long to be useful; it seems like using fu'ivla depends unnecessarily on another language and is opaque to a hypothetical lojban only speaker. Perhaps lujvo and corresponding zi'evla for frequent use?
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mu'o mi'e .arpis.
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