From lojbab@lojban.org Fri Aug 25 08:08:57 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 29856 invoked from network); 25 Aug 2000 15:08:57 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by m1.onelist.org with QMQP; 25 Aug 2000 15:08:57 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO stmpy-2.cais.net) (205.252.14.72) by mta2 with SMTP; 25 Aug 2000 15:08:57 -0000 Received: from bob (12.dynamic.cais.com [207.226.56.12]) by stmpy-2.cais.net (8.10.1/8.9.3) with ESMTP id e7PF8r837189 for ; Fri, 25 Aug 2000 11:08:55 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from lojbab@lojban.org) Message-Id: <4.2.2.20000825105011.00ac3c40@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: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 11:06:40 -0400 To: lojban@egroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] le stura be la gihuste In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" At 02:11 PM 08/25/2000 +0000, michael helsem wrote: > >From: "David Twery" > 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 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