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Re: [lojban] Big baby words list
On 11/02/2011 10:43 AM, najrut wrote:
I'm strongly against manual adding new words. Why don't use some
algorithm similar to used in scoreGismu ?
chinese 嗝 ge
hindi Hicakī hicak
english hiccup xikap
spanish hipo xip
arabic فواق [fwaq] fuak
russian икать [ikats'] ika
All this makes me like type-4 fu'ivla even less. Here I am, bobbing
along, reading my Lojban text. I come across an unfamiliar word. Gee,
whatever could this be? Oh, of course, it's a combination of the Spanish
and Russian. Or it's the native term for something. So all I need to do
to understand Lojban is to learn the (effectively a priori) gismu and
rafsi, and be able to recognize ALL THE OTHER LANGUAGES THERE ARE. These
fu'ivla are effectively a priori words like gismu, except that gismu are
fixed in number and have a fixed authoritative list. If everyone
randomly makes up words when they can't be bothered to think of a good
lujvo (which is not to say that all fu'ivla can be replaced by lujvo,
but (a) I think more of them can than is commonly claimed, and (b) even
given that I'm wrong about that, you can bet that there are no few
fu'ivla that are/will be invented that would be better as lujvo), then
we get a million non-mutually-intelligible dialects, not a language at
all. And even for fu'ivla that are legitimately fu'ivla, there will
still be arbitrarily many different forms depending on the biases and
knowledge of each coiner.
I think at *least* you should give some sort of heads-up in the form of
prefixed rafsi (type-3 fu'ivla), maybe start to learn to transition from
type-3 to type-4 as it becomes more familiar (make dropping off that
rafsi for well-known words a "natural" part of colloquial and fluent
speech), and make type-4 fu'ivla only when they are (or will be) more or
less universally recognized. Or at the very least make sure there's a
Central Repository, an Academie Lojbanique, to approve these fu'ivla so
at least I have someplace to look them up.
~mark
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