[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: [lojban] What is the source of gismu *definitions*?
la gleki wrote:
Every Lojbanist understands that gismu denote predicates that are highly
practical.
e.g. {pilno} includes a goal as pilno3. Indeed, how can we imagine using
something without a goal?
My question is who collected those definitions?
Me.
Was it JCB?
> How was this gimste formed?
JCB set the place structures for the TLI Loglan words. His general
philosophy of doing so was set forth in his books Loglan 1 and Loglan 2,
though he didn't always follow his own principles.
I started with JCB's list, but greatly modified it, both adding and
deleting words. As such, there are half-again as many gismu as there
were in TLI Loglan of the time. In very few cases can I tell you for
certain the specific reason I added certain words, though for the
culture words I made an attempt to be systematic. A large chunk was
added in 1988 as a result of Athelstan doing a thorough analysis based
on Roget's thesaurus, to make sure that we had good coverage of all
semantic domains.
During the period from about 1990-1994, I subjected all change proposals
to the LogFest attendees, representing the community, for approval. In
the latter two years, a faction emerged favoring the elimination of some
gismu and thus keeping the total number constant, in the face of new
proposals, if not shrinking. One last group of new ones was approved,
and the list was frozen. Many years passed before any word was proposed
with significant justification, thus suggesting that this decision was
correct. (If no one has really needed a word in 25 odd years of use, it
is hard to argue that it is fundamental, even if it might be useful.)
Place structures started with JCB's general pattern. I attempted to
find patterns, and then to make words of similar semantic domain
consistent. Thus all plant and animal gismu were to have a species
place. I eventually got things fairly systematic, though I made some
mistakes. At that point, pretty much no one besides me was looking that
closely.
I strongly avoided one-place predicates.
But at one point, I realized I was going too far, ascribing to any
possible tool a purpose, and to any object both material and form
places. I backed off from this somewhat. I thus avoided >5 place
predicates. At about this point, the current concept of BAI started to
emerge, and it was realized that a large number of places were
superfluous. I made one last pass, generally reducing many of the
excess places I had added.
Is there a changelog of modifications to gismu
definitions starting from the first edition of loglan?
Not hardly. I introduced the concept of configuration management in the
1988-1994 period, starting to document all changes once a chunk of the
language was baselined. Before it was baselined, documentation was
rarely attempted, though there are some cases. In only a few cases do
we even have good copies of the evolving word lists - this was still a
primarily paper and pencil project.
My particular interest here is with the recent discussion of a possible
new gismu meaning "qua". The corresponding word is of high frequency in
Mandarin but in European languages it is often confused with words
meaning {simsa}.
e.g.
"as" means both "like" and "qua".
Russian "как" [kak] means both "like" and "qua".
I have no comment on the merits of this, other than to merely observe
that many of the world's languages seem to do fine without making a
distinction.
The gismu list is baselined. New gismu are not being considered, and
there is no plan to do so in the future, though this could be revisited
AFTER the existing language is fully documented.
Were Mandarin predicates taken into consideration while constructing
gismu definitions?
Not that I know of. I did the Mandarin work for Lojban, and I don't
know Mandarin.
More importantly, almost no consideration of semantics was involved in
gismu-making. If the basic meaning was generally covered, that was good
enough. It was expected that the meanings and place structures would
evolve with usage. (But by 1997, the community was tired of my and
other senior Lojbanists changing the language by fiat. The community
wanted the language to stop changing in that matter. Completely. I
agreed with them. We don't change the language by fiat anymore. The
only exception, adopted for byfy use, is that stuff which is so broken
as to prevent good documentation of the status quo language, could be
changed so as to allow that documentation. (Since then, sentiment seems
to have grown against "usage-based change" which is the other
alternative, and one that cannot really be prevented. People generally
are biased against change in language. They want books that are
prescriptive and unchanging, whereas lexicographers strongly consider
dictionaries by nature to be descriptive rather than prescriptive.)
I did use some systematic techniques to try to be sure I was picking the
correct root, and for a brief time, we had a native Mandarin speaker who
looked over what I had done with approval. (A couple of Mandarin
speakers since then have also said that the work I did was more than
adequate, but they were generally comparing us to Esperanto and other
Euroclone languages). I also used 3 different dictionaries in the case
of Mandarin in order to be more certain, since Mandarin has such a high
weight in Lojban word-making. Still, there are flaws, and I think my
choice for Lojbanization of Mandarin was especially bad, being based
solely on the quasi-official Chinese description of the IPA
pronunciation of Chinese particles, and the system I used for mapping
IPA in other languages. As a result, Mandarin inputs had too many "a"s
representing schwa, and too many fricatives were mapped to s and c,
leading to Lojban having a "she sells sea shells" quality that is hard
for some speakers, including me, to speak the language quickly and
accurately.
But I don't know enough Mandarin grammar to have any clue what subjects
and objects any given Mandarin word might require (if any) I did enough
comparative linguistics study to be reasonably confident that my
approach was "good enough".
(Arabic is the other language where my word-making rules were systematic
but led to a relatively poor result. And since Arabic has the lowest
weight of the 6 source languages, this meant that Arabic influenced
relative few words, and its inputs were less useful to Arabic speaking
Lojbanists.
JCB may have had some native speaker inputs in the early days, but my
general observations on his choices for word-making suggest that they
were even more limited and flawed than my efforts. I know that we had
much better dictionaries by 1987 than JCB had in 1955.
lojbab
--
Bob LeChevalier lojbab@lojban.org www.lojban.org
President and Founder, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.