Re: Use fu'ivla more (was Re: [lojban] Supporting Lojbanic babies.)

[Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>]

On Wed, Nov 02, 2011 at 03:32:18PM -0400, Ian Johnson wrote:
> I think a lot of the arguments "against" lujvo in this thread
> vanish when you insist to yourself to at least give a pure lojban
> definition of a lujvo an attempt. Example from the other day that
> I made that I think illustrates the point pretty well:
>
> http://jbovlaste.lojban.org/dict/menseika'e
>
> It makes sense for this to be a lujvo because I can write out what
> it means in lojban.

I think that's a pretty excellent test, actually, although I do
believe that anything *can* be explained in Lojban with only the
words we have ... eventually.  :)  It just might take a page of
text.  But "can be compactly described in Lojban" seems like a good
boundary condition for lujvo-making.

In that particular case, though, it doesn't really work; "menli
sepli" doesn't mean anything like "distinguish" to me at all.  I'd
take that to mean "can keep two issues seperate in one's mind", like
a therapist who sees both of a married couple and has to keep their
issues seperated mentally.  If you showed me your Lojban definition
there, I'd *never* have come up with a meaning remotely like the
English word "distinguish", which to me has nothing whatsoever to do
with {sepli}.  "distinguish" is about being able to tell the
differences between things, which is {frica} I think.  In other
words, and I'm sorry, menseika'e is a really bad word IMO for the
stated English meaning.

That doesn't change the fact that I agree with your assertion about
lujvo.

> If you have legitimate trouble with a pure lojban definition, at
> least for the denotation of the word, it probably doesn't make
> sense for it to be a lujvo. At the very least it probably isn't
> jvajvo.

+1

> Incidentally, it would be kinda nice if type 4s could have rafsi,
> so that you could coin just a few basic jargon concepts and then
> interrelate the others using lujvo. For example you could have a
> lujvo of "integrated circuit" and a handful of others and with a
> little more work you could coin a lot of the jargon hardware terms
> as lujvo.

IIRC xorxes had a proposal there?

-Robin

-- 
http://singinst.org/ :  Our last, best hope for a fantastic future.
Lojban (http://www.lojban.org/): The language in which "this parrot
is dead" is "ti poi spitaki cu morsi", but "this sentence is false"
is "na nei".   My personal page: http://www.digitalkingdom.org/rlp/

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