Re: [lojban] Alice essay

[Wuzzy <almikes@aol.com>]

> Who stops you from entering them? There is even {lonu} in jbovlaste
> with comments for absolute noobs of what it means.
Nobody. But I won’t enter them because I didn’t coin them. Only the
authors of those words could know the sense they meant. If I enter the
words, it could be in a different sense than in the text and then the
dictionary sense would differ from the alis sense. 
That’s why I said it would be better to first write the definition of a
lujvo and then to use it; not vice-versa.
If one first coins a lujvo but doesn’t define it and immediately uses
it, this lujvo is always in danger of being in inconsistent use.
Sooner or later it would happen. Authors of other texts may have
coined the same lujvo in an ad-hoc way, but in a different sense. If
this happens, the same lujvo has de-facto different definitions.
Writing a definition in the dictionary _after_ that happened is
dangerous and *will* render some texts “wrong” (de jure). That’s why I
won’t write the definition, because it just increases the risk of
inconsistency. Only the authors could possibly know what they actually
meant.
This situation can not happen if one doesn’t use lujvo which nobody has
defined before.
Lujvo are intended to have a *single* definition. If one doesn’t want
to write a definition, there’s always a fallback option with  “za'e” or
a tanru instead. So if the authors are not willing to write definitions
of their own words, all they’d have to do is to convert the lujvo in
question to tanru or to “za'e” them out. The “za'e” approach has a big
benefit, if one of the authors decided to write down a definition of
the word in the sense it was used in the alis text, the “za'e” of the
lujvo in question can be removed. “za'e” would also work for fu'ivla.
There was an argument against “za'e” because it is considered ugly. I
consider this argument a rather weak one. My point was about clariy, not
beauty. ;-)


And what does “lonu” have to do with this? I am only talking about lujvo
and fu'ivla, not about cmavo clusters.

-- 
Wuzzy
XMPP: Wuzzy2@jabber.ccc.de
E-Mail: wuzzy2@mail.ru

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.