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Re: [lojban] request for a new gismu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Episodic_memory

Ian Johnson wrote:

      Until we know more about how the brain does memory, it seems
    presumptuous to claim that these are different "concepts" as opposed
    to different memories.

As gleki has pointed out, there is significant evidence that the two
actually are different. Also, although it is a small sample, at the time
of coming up with this idea several of us (tsani, gleki, and I, possibly
others) all realized that our ways of interacting with these types of
memories were significantly different, and that this seemed to be
responsible for several experiences with memory. For example, I remarked
that I remember certain concepts in mathematics in a way more similar to
how I remember experiences than to how I remember other facts, and that
these memories are inevitably more permanent and vivid than their
counterparts. gleki remarked that he had a brief epiphany of the
importance of this concept before quickly losing it to the lack of a
word for it in his native language.
That the experience of having these kinds of memories is different does not mean that the concept is fundamentally different from any other kind of memory. The place structure is essentially the same; you just fill in a different kind of value. 


    morji is NOT restricted to du'u.  The parenthetical use in the gismu
    list is NOT a restriction (and indeed there aren't really ANY
    restrictions so long as it is grammatical - the semantics of lojban
    has not been formally defined).

You may say that,


Because it is true.


but this type analysis is part of the way that the
language, as I've seen it in the last few years, has evolved.
There have been people who have tried to analyze semantic issues. But their analysis is not part of the language definition. It is at best descriptive and not prescriptive.
This is by design intent, and will persist until/unless some authority like byfy changes it. And it isn't on byfy's agenda to even consider such issues yet, and probably for a long time to come. A lot of more important stuff comes first and hasn't gotten done. 


Evolved restriction is not new to natlangs, why should it be new to conlangs?
I have no idea whether it is found in other conlangs. It is not part of Lojban. 


    One can claim, I think somewhat arbitrarily), that memorizing a
    quote is a different sort of memory than a fact or an episode.  If
    so, one might make lujvo based on morji to distinguish the
    presumably different memory types of facts, quotes, and episodes,
    and define the place structure of the lujvo specific to your more
    restricted meaning.

    (I think I should note that such specialized and restricted-meaning
    lujvo are a type that is not necessarily achievable using jvajvo
    rules, because we didn't really build the tools for
    semantic-rules-based lujvo-making into the language - the concept of
    having rules to determine place structures was an afterthought
    regularization devised by Nick Nicolas as a result of his analysis
    of patterns of how people actually were making lujvo).

It's been stated already that the problem with going about this way is
that the lujvo that you would want to use for this concept have useful
jvajvo meanings which are distinct from this concept.
jvajvo is also not a mandatory rule. And that a jvajvo exists does not necessarily give that meaning priority over a new and more useful meaning.
In general, shorter words are the ones that are more frequent, by Zipf's laws. Almost no lujvo exist that are so frequent as to demand a short form. There simply isn't a large enough corpus to measure such usage. 

But in any case, there are an essentially infinite number of possible lujvo.
And there are exactly 1357 gismu, with no more expected to be added for the indefinite future, because there is no defined procedure to even consider same, and the list is formally baselined. We would use experimental Type IV rafsi-able fu'ivla before coining new gismu. 


"Remembering
something about an experience" and "remembering an experience" are both
useful ideas which should have separate terms.


To me
The first is x1 morji ledu'u [] li'i []
The second is x1 morji li'i [] zo'e
And if I really needed a lujvo for the latter, I would coin frimo'i. And if some other meaning already exists for that lujvo, I would change the lesser used one by adding some other term.
But in any event, I don't sweat whether there is another word in jbovlaste (and in fact I never use it). I would coin the word I wanted, and iff it caused confusion with some other meaning, only then would I actually debate the question. It hasn't yet happened (though I admit I am not a heavy user of the language, and don't interact much online with others in Lojban). 

lojbab

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