Subject: Re: [lojban] le stura be la gihuste

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 11:06:40 -0400

At 02:11 PM 08/25/2000 +0000, michael helsem wrote:
> >From: "David Twery" <[email-masked]>
> li'o
> >5271 lujvo, from backemselrerkru (hyperbola) to
> >zvastejbu (conference registration table). About 40 of these have >place
> >structures
>
>i would just like to interject that the bulk of these lujvo belong to a
>period in the evolution of lojban usage, in which it was thought necessary
>to coin a lujvo for every english word the speaker was trying to express,
>rather than attempting to formulate original thoughts in lojban. very many
>of them are bad lojban, & i see no need for this labor for the most part
>when equivalent tanru can be coined naturally & understood readily; in fact,
>going through that trouble tends to cast an aura of officialness on them &
>would lead to unfortunate habits of usage were they to become regarded as
>exact equivalents of the english words they were coined to express.

The answer to this is simple. We need to go through them, give keywords to 
each (not place structures) so that people have some idea what they are 
dealing with, sort by keyword so that we can tell when multiple coinings 
exist for the same English word, and then people like you who think that a 
word is "bad Lojban" can then speak out against a particular coining, in 
favor of a tanru, other lujvo, or some other solution. Those coinings in 
the data base that someone thinks are poor need not be analyzed in full and 
enshrined in the dictionary, but someone sometime WILL go through them and 
decide whether they are to be included. If it is me, and there has been no 
work done by anyone else, I can tell you that usage will win over non-usage 
- a bad word will win over no word at all, because I do not feel it is my 
role to decide something is "bad Lojban" unless it is formed in violation 
of some rule. I am a descriptivist, and mere usage makes the word a Lojban 
word unless someone has a specific argument against it. (Sheer volume 
might make me limit myself to most used lujvo by the frequencies recorded 
in the file, but there are known cases of "bad Lojban" that have been much 
used. So those concerned about including words that are bad should go 
through the list as well as speak against the ones they see arguments against.

>there are indeed lujvo we need, but at the moment i even think a certain
>amount of awkwardness is preferable... in any case we need not await THE
>dictionary before attempting to express ourselves in lojban directly.

"We" may not need the dictionary in order to express ourselves, but 
unfortunately many in the greater Lojban community if not the world will 
not think much of the language, nor try to learn much less use it, until we 
have committed sufficient lexicon to paper that they feel that the language 
is stable and usable. Furthermore, the large contingent that relies on 
glossers and translation programs, and those interested in building such 
programs, need data for the words that DO get used.

>that would be like shakespeare not daring to write until samuel johnson came
>along...

Even by the time a Shakespeare there were English lexicons if not full 
dictionaries, and of course Shakespeare had centuries of usage behind him 
to set patterns of word coinings and borrowings. We are still working at 
the pre-lexicon stage and lack the usage history, and most of us have no 
pretensions at being another Shakespeare. The Lojban world thus demands 
the crutch, but we can start with keywords and only do complete analysis 
for selected words from the set to minimize redundancy and allow the bad to 
be weeded out.

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