Subject: RE: [lojban] dictionary - which words?

From: Robert LeChevalier <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 01 Sep 2002 01:08:01 -0400

At 09:46 PM 8/31/02 +0000, Jorge Llambias wrote:
>la greg cusku di'e
> >The problem, however, is that semau is one lexeme composed of two words,
> >and
> >we might want to look up that lexeme. If I know se and mau, but I do not
> >know zmadu, then knowing that semau is se+mau does not tell me what it
> >*means*.
>
>But you can't know mau and not know all the places of zmadu.
>You need not know that mau comes from zmadu, but the definition
>of mau has to include all the places of zmadu. ka'a does not
>just tag any goer. It tags a goer that has a destination, an
>origin, a route and a means of going. Very heavy baggage, but
>that's Lojban.

So for you the definition of mau includes all the possible definitions of X 
+ mau and for mau + Y for arbitrary X or Y.

Most people would think that the definition of mau is that of mau by 
itself; that the meaning changes in a phrase means that they should be told 
to look up the phrase.

"mau" by itself does NOT access all the places of "zmadu". If we are going 
to list the meaning of "se mau" under "mau", why aren't we listing it under 
"se". The 2nd place of zmadu is no more a part of the definition of mau 
than it is part of the definition of "se".

(I'm being a devil's advocate here - in some ways you are correct, but that 
would be a lot of manual work or some pretty hairy software to figure out 
exactly what headword to list which word combinations under, and then 
combine the text in some logical and well-formatted manner.)

lojbab

-- 
lojbab [email-masked]
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