From lojbab@lojban.org Sat Aug 17 12:42:18 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: lojbab@lojban.org X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_0_7_4); 17 Aug 2002 19:42:18 -0000 Received: (qmail 83245 invoked from network); 17 Aug 2002 19:42:18 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.218) by m2.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 17 Aug 2002 19:42:18 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO lakemtao04.cox.net) (68.1.17.241) by mta3.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 17 Aug 2002 19:42:18 -0000 Received: from lojban.lojban.org ([68.100.206.153]) by lakemtao04.cox.net (InterMail vM.5.01.04.05 201-253-122-122-105-20011231) with ESMTP id <20020817194217.GAPP4949.lakemtao04.cox.net@lojban.lojban.org> for ; Sat, 17 Aug 2002 15:42:17 -0400 Message-Id: <5.1.0.14.0.20020817150724.00ac4730@pop.east.cox.net> X-Sender: rlechevalier@pop.east.cox.net X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 5.1 Date: Sat, 17 Aug 2002 15:41:42 -0400 To: lojban list Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: zo xruti xruti In-Reply-To: <002901c24629$9cdfa0a0$61b4003e@default> References: <5.1.0.14.0.20020810111025.032cb880@pop.east.cox.net> <5.1.0.14.0.20020811195117.031545b0@pop.east.cox.net> <5.1.0.14.0.20020816114920.0304dc00@pop.east.cox.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed From: Robert LeChevalier X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=1120595 X-Yahoo-Profile: lojbab At 10:01 PM 8/17/02 +0200, Adam Raizen wrote: >'sezyxru' (and 'vo'a zei xruti' and any other lujvo I can think of >other than 'zilpavyxru') often do not have the necessary meaning. One >often wants to say that something reverted to a former state, fatne binxo? (fatybi'o) Originally binxo/galfi cenba/stika were intended to be the generic words for change, both agentive and non-agentive. Regularization of place structures and sumti-raising made the x1 of galfi and stika an event, allowing the use of gansu or zukte for agentive and purposeful agentive action to modify those. fatne then was to be used to indicate the reverse of any of these changes (or any other reversal of process not easily indicated by na'e/to'e). xruti was an overlapping word for what now is fatne ke galfi (gasnu) or fatne ke stika (gasnu) because the latter were too long for their frequency per Zipf. >If you don't >think of lujvo components as anything more than mnemonics, then maybe >that is not a problem, but for me it is completely against the spirit >of lojban. Your feeling, shared by many, seems to have been a later development in Lojban (though perhaps old to recent arrivals since it emerged around 1993-4), since mnemonicity was the classic purpose (But even that was not original. It was the 1982 GMR revision to Loglan that even gave uniquely decomposable mnemonics, and TLI Loglan still uses madzo (lojban zbasu) for all agentive causality patterned apparently after the English or Latinate "make". Before that, lujvo were recognizable from their components the way gismu are recognizable from their etymologies.) Thus I can see it as being a dispreferred choice to go away from dikyjvo, but it is hard to call the language "broken" when this isn't easy or requires a longer word form than we would prefer/Zipf would suggest. (Part of the reason that Zipf's Law is noteworthy as a language design tool is the very realization that words are sometimes shortened with information loss in order to be consistent with usage frequency; hence acronyms. > (I concede that 'zilpavyxru' would have the necessary >meaning, but it is unnecessarily long and complicated.) Why not just zilxru? The pa seems to be the logical default for a deleted place, since you can get the others with SE rather than numbering. >I think that best solution to this, rather than changing the place >structure of 'xruti', is to create a new gismu using the gismu >algorithm. This will preserve everyone's existing lojban and the >baseline, and should also satisfy those clamoring for the change, >since an extra gismu will not hurt anything, and it will be easier to >get people to start using a new gismu correctly, than to get them to >use 'xruti' in a way inconsistent with the baseline. Adding new gismu is an even bigger change to the baseline. We truly want the gismu to be suffering "hardening of the arteries", even if the results are a bit clumsy, at this stage. Otherwise the long term prognosis is that language evolution will be excessively rapid, with new roots popping into the gismu list as rapidly as new roots appear in Esperanto. The goal was to force people to use lujvo, even LONG lujvo, to build the lexicon up, constrained between the rigid set of short gismu, and the very clumsy artificially-lengthened Type 3 borrowing rules (I still believe that we have no frequency basis for making Type 4 fu'ivla yet, and only the bias basis for culture words that did not make the gismu list and can't be made as lujvo). lojbab -- lojbab lojbab@lojban.org Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org