Subject: Re: [lojban] Expressing in Lojban concepts there aren't gismu for

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2000 09:06:03 -0400

At 09:07 AM 08/21/2000 +0000, [email-masked] wrote:
>The gismu list at http://www.lojban.org/files/wordlists/gismu gives,
>for example, the Lojban words "logji" for "logic", "cmaci"
>for "mathematics", "saske" for a loose meaning of "science",
>and "citri" for "history", but I haven't found any Lojban words
>anywhere for "logician", "mathematician", "scientist", "historian",
>etc. How can you express these concepts, and others like them in
>general, in Lojban?

Depends on what you mean by them. There is no single word in the gismu 
list since there is no gismu for them. Probably there are several lujvo 
for each, but the lujvo list is perpetually in need of volunteers to come 
up with glosses and eventually place structures for words that have been 
used in Lojban text.

What is a mathematician? A mathematics-person? A mathematics-expert? A 
mathematics-studier? A mathematics-teacher? A mathematics-user? Each of 
those and many others would be a separate Lojban tanru that could be made 
into a distinct compound, and all of them could be translated in the right 
contexts as "mathematician".

>Incidentally, I haven't seen any Lojban word for "philosophy"
>anywhere either, so how can you express this in Lojban?

This word has all of the nebulosity of the above words and then some. You 
need to define the word before you can hope to make a Lojban word for 
it. If you merely want to loan translate from the Greek, something like 
wisdom-fond would be a usable tanru, but few would understand you I think.

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