Re: [lojban] Lojban's Biggest Problem or Why Still Nobody Speaks It

[Pierre Abbat <phma@bezitopo.org>]

On Sunday, October 26, 2014 18:51:45 selpa'i wrote:
> Simply put, there aren't enough words, and the few words that exist do
> not enable us to make nuanced descriptions of the world.
> 
> I see the two main aspects of the problem as being:
> 
> 1) The existing words (specifically the gismu) are too vague by
> themselves (and yes, I know that this is by design)
> 2) Too many essential concepts are missing completely

li'o

> 2. "Not enough words"
> 
> What do the words traffic, traffic lights, traffic jam have in common?
> They are all examples of everyday words that are completely missing from
> the Lojban lexicon. I could name hundreds more. And it makes speaking
> the language beyond a certain level impossible.

"Traffic" is pretty clearly "ma'efle" in that sense. (Drug traffic is something 
else.)

> If the goal is to have true fluent speakers of Lojban, then this
> lexicon-shaped hole in the language must be filled as soon as possible.

I agree.

Now let's consider some other languages that have undergone an expansion or 
modernization of vocabulary in recent centuries: Hungarian, Turkish, Hebrew, 
and Navajo. Hungarian and Turkish are both agglutinative; long words usually 
consist of a single root with several affixes (like English 
"antidisestablishmentarianism", which consists of the root "(e)sta" and a 
bunch of affixes) or are compounds of such words. It is not difficult to map SAE 
vocabulary onto a word formation like that.

Hebrew words consist of a root (usually three consonants, some have two or 
four), a pattern of vowels and possibly inserted consonants called a binyan 
(similar to grammatical voice but there are at least seven), and a few affixes. 
(The Arabic-derived vocabulary, much of which was discarded in the Turkish 
language reform, is similar.) Much of the vocabulary for which new Hebrew 
words were coined doesn't fit this form and was borrowed.

Navajo is the most different from English, of these languages. I don't know 
much about Navajo morphology, but I do know it belongs to an ancient language 
family, Dene-Yeniseian, which originated among hunter-gatherers in Siberia and 
spread across the Bering land bridge. Until the Spanish arrived, the Navajos 
had no domestic animals. If you look through the Navajo entries in Wiktionary, 
you'll see that they have very different ways of naming things.

Lojban vocabulary formation is different from SAE in (at least) two ways: it 
has a different idea of what concepts are verbs and what are nouns (there are 
no adjectives), and long words typically contain almost as many roots as 
syllables. This results in different ways of dividing up semantic space (one 
word means both "crowbar" and "nutpick", and if you're looking for an exact 
equivalent of "august", forget it).

As to "traffic light", I suggest "jezystisni". That doesn't have to be a light, 
and what it stops doesn't have to be traffic.

What are some more essential concepts that are missing?

Pierre
-- 
Jews use a lunisolar calendar; Muslims use a solely lunar calendar.

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