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

[tijlan <jbotijlan@gmail.com>]

On 2 July 2011 23:42, Stela Selckiku <selckiku@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Yes, "nanla" and "citnau" may have different pragmatics. "citnau" may
be effectively more comparative than "nanla" to "citno / makcu" and
"nanmu / ninmu", which may give rise to a difference in usage between
"citnau" and "nanla".

The point of my response to Escape, though, was: If multiple words are
defined to mean the same thing, that itself won't be the worst thing
that can happen, since communication won't fail for such semantic
convergence.


>> 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.

je'e


mu'o mi'e tijlan

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