Re: [lojban] What is the source of gismu *definitions*?

["Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG" <lojbab@lojban.org>]

Ian Johnson wrote:
> This really only covers morphology in significant detail, the actual
> choice of the words from the source languages as well as the way in
> which the place structures of the words were created are rather
> undocumented, to my knowledge.

The choice of the words from source languages is fully documented, but 
not in a net-available form.  I have a thick binder with one handwritten 
form page per 1 to 4 words showing precisely what the etymologies were 
that we considered, and that were actually used. An abbreviated form 
showing what was finally used is in a file on the Lojban web site somewhere.

The handwritten pages could in theory be scanned, but it would take 
forever, and many pages have notes on the back-side that would be hard 
to correlate with the separate front-side pages if they got separated.

There are also page summaries of the Lojbanization rules.

I also have all of the dictionaries we used and could therefore probably 
reconstruct what I did for four of the six languages.  I cannot read the 
Hindi and Arabic alphabets, and hence would have to rely on Tommy 
Whitlock for those languages, since again we still have the dictionaries 
and he lives locally.



The place structure evolution is undocumented, except to the extent that 
we have the TLI word lists and some of the early Lojban word lists. 
showing what the status quo was at those times.  (I probably have many 
more word lists archived in backup files on hundreds of old 5" floppy 
disks, but I don't have the backup program, even if the disks are still 
readable.)

There is probably more stuff in the archives than I can specifically 
recall, because my policy as archivist has been to try to save 
everything that was written in a savable form.  But at this point 25 
year old unindexed archives are probably of little use.  It would take 
someone hundreds of hours to put the archives in a form where they could 
be productively used to research, and the desire for such comes up too 
infrequently to make it anyone's priority.

I did leave one other source of place structure evolutionary changes in 
my last post.  Relatively late in the process, in the early 90s 
(probably there is a trace on Lojban List), the concept of sumti-raising 
arose.  This problem was originally discussed in snail mail letters 
between pc and me (much early Lojban design is documented in those snail 
mails, all of which I kept - but finding which ones are important to any 
given concept is rather difficult).  I did a thorough review looking for 
gismu places that relied on raised sumti, and that is when so many x2 
and x3 places were changed from a simple description to an abstraction 
(such as has been discussed with sisku).  Probably a couple hundred 
place structures were changed in that review, and they can be found be 
looking for explicit mentions of abstraction places in the list.  Before 
that review, very few gismu were expressed in terms of abstractions.

lojbab

--
Bob LeChevalier    lojbab@lojban.org    www.lojban.org
President and Founder, The Logical Language Group, Inc.

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