From lojbab@lojban.org Sat Jul 29 22:11:47 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 21226 invoked from network); 30 Jul 2000 05:11:47 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m4.onelist.org with QMQP; 30 Jul 2000 05:11:47 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO stmpy-4.cais.net) (205.252.14.74) by mta1 with SMTP; 30 Jul 2000 05:11:47 -0000 Received: from bob (81.dynamic.cais.com [207.226.56.81]) by stmpy-4.cais.net (8.10.1/8.9.3) with ESMTP id e6U5BjE87178 for ; Sun, 30 Jul 2000 01:11:46 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from lojbab@lojban.org) Message-Id: <4.2.2.20000730010430.00b51100@127.0.0.1> X-Sender: vir1036/pop.cais.com@127.0.0.1 X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.2.2 Date: Sun, 30 Jul 2000 01:10:28 -0400 To: lojban@egroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] tertirxu In-Reply-To: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" At 10:32 AM 07/29/2000 -0700, Jim Carter wrote: > > What I am finding difficult about Lojban is learning the right > > place structures. Any patterns that can be discovered are always > > full of exceptions, and the result is that I am usually not sure > > whether or not a given gismu has some mysterious trailing places > > that I am forgetting... > >Hear, hear! There's a lot of value to having regular place structures. I >put a fair amount of work into regularizing the place structures in Old >Loglan (an effort that didn't fly), and a lot of semantic categories are >very amenable to a "bed of Procrustes" approach. I was disappointed when >Lojban drifted off in the direction of custom-crafting each predicate's >definition according to which arguments are most important to it. You are mistaken to presume that we threw out your efforts, Jim. In general, words in a common semantic category have the same "arguments most important to it", but of course it is the grouping of words by common semantic categories that is the tough nut to crack, especially since Lojban tries to eschew such categorization as may be culturally biased. I though the place structures were fairly systematic based on my mind-set the last time I went through them before baselining, but I'm only human. People have found places where I was inconsistent, and probably they simply haven't discovered all the categorizations I used in deciding what to make similar to what else. 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