Re: [lojban] Re: How it should have been. And how it could be.

[Stela Selckiku <selckiku@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 7:21 PM, tijlan <jbotijlan@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> If those new words each *convey* one stable meaning as they should,
> there wouldn't be much of a problem. It's ok to have "nanla",
> "nakyve'a", "citnau", etc. with the same meaning, provided that the
> meaning can be unambiguously understood.

I'm not sure that's how languages work.  Words want to occupy their
own space.  If you take a set of meanings where there's "nanla" and
you drop in "citnau" they don't want to mean exactly the same thing.
They start to bounce off of each other magnetically, until every time
you choose to say "citnau" or "nanla" you're implicitly conveying a
socially relevant distinction.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that-- that's how natural
languages came to be, and they're pretty useful-- but it does tend to
lead to malglico, since the most readily available distinctions are
preexisting ones.  For instance I wouldn't be surprised to see the
nanla/citnau split try to follow the boy / young man split in English,
such that a nanla is much younger than sexual maturity, and someone
might start to prefer "citnau" and be offended by "nanla" at a certain
age.  It's probably best to look for any Lojbanic difference we can
teach and emphasize when there are similar words, instead of just
leaving them as "the same" and letting them find their own subtleties.

> A worse case would be a word with competing and equally-sound
> definitions.

This happens all the time, to greater and lesser degrees.  I think
we've informally created a fairly effective system for dealing with
it.

The first step is to make specific words that definitely produce the
various possible meanings that various people want, such as longer
lujvo.  This clarifies the dispute, provides useful vocabulary for
discussing it, and ensures that no one walks away from the table
entirely empty handed-- you definitely get some word that produces the
meaning you wanted to express, you might just get a slightly longer
one than you'd hoped for.

Then the default solution is: The meaning of the shorter term is now
generalized to include both of the meanings, and the long forms can be
used as necessary to disambiguate.  That solution is the first
considered because it's very often acceptable to everyone.  None of
the past uses of the term are invalidated, they're just using a more
general term than they thought they were, but it'll still almost
always imply exactly the same thing in context.  The language is
deepened by some specific vocabulary, while a broader word is given a
new shape and character that tends to make it a bit less malgli and a
bit more lobykai.

There are of course many cases where that solution doesn't work.  Most
often because the meaning spaces aren't contiguous enough, so our
polysemy alarms go off.  In these cases what almost always wins is
history.  If a word has been used in a particular way for long enough
or prominently enough then that meaning has dibs.  There are plenty of
other lujvo in the sea, go get your own.

This criterion of history is necessary to keep old texts from being
disrupted, but it's also fairly unambiguous, which helps provide
clarity.  For instance, I don't especially like the word "lujyjvo".
As you may or may not know, it means lujvo that (like itself) have
matching consonants on the inside facing each other: "cucycau",
"samymri".  I think complex-lujvo is (A) a word that doesn't
particularly suggest that meaning and (B) a waste of a word that could
have a very useful meaning.  I would have put the meaning that's now
on "lujyjvo" somewhere else, like "cijyjvo" (wrinkled lujvo).  But
it's very easy to resolve this dispute.  You don't have to consider
whether I'm right at all (incidentally, I am).  The word had already
been used for years before I thought to dispute it.  The statute of
limitations was well up.  I lose.

Another occasional result, though not an especially desirable one, is
that the battle rages on for a while.  In that case the word in
question tends to become scorched earth.  That's fine-- again, there
are plenty of words out there, there's billions of three part lujvo.
We simply avoid the area forevermore.  Same thing with all the false
starts and malgli, the "le'avla" and "dikyjvo" that litter our
lujvoland, we just leave them there as monuments.  Someday maybe it'll
be so crowded that we'll need to make use of this junk-- I've always
imagined le'avla as meaning the less usual situation of borrowing a
word from a language which then loses that word or dies, and perhaps a
dikyjvo could be a lujvo that appears regularly like for instance
seasonal ones the citsyjvo-- but today is not that day.  Today we live
with this history while we work at making more mistakes with what's
left.

mi'e la stela selckiku mu'o

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