Subject: Re: [lojban] lujvo & tanru

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 14:04:00 -0400

At 06:50 AM 08/26/2000 -0400, David Twery wrote:
>I think we do need some "common lujvo". The gismu themselves (individually)
>are not adequate for a basic vocabulary. At the very least, tanru are
>needed, and that's why lujvo are supposed to be coined -- to prevent adding
>gismu *ad hoc* and *ad nauseam*.
>
>(Sure, there's a case to be made for more gismu. Maybe about fifty. Maybe.
>And not desperately.)
>
>"Common" lujvo would have common sets of place structures, would be more
>easily learned as language patterns, and would be easier to extend or
>modify, requiring the dynamic skill you write about. The set of lujvo
>composed of a SE lujvo plus the rafsi -- such as selkla, terkla, velkla, and
>xemkla, from the places of klama -- is large, and easy to make "on the fly",
>and extends the vocabulary to over 3000 brivla.
>
>Using zma or mau (zmadu) as a "suffix" is like using "-er" in English to
>augment something: bigger, greener, happier, etc. It's a common usage and
>the place structure isn't too hard to figure out.
>
>In the same way, -cau (claxu) is used for "-less", and -ske (saske) tends to
>be used for "-ology".
>
>So, what we need is not a set of cast-in-iron lujvo, but a set of both
>usable lujvo *and lujvo-making patterns* that most Lojbanists can agree on,
>that come from actual Lojban use and not forcing glico into a lojbo mold.

Might I suggest then that the first step in processing the *massive* lujvo 
file is to find all the words fitting these "easy" patterns, one pattern at 
a time, and then making keywords and place structures for them. I would 
presume that this would NOT take 10 minutes per lujvo, and might cut the 
pile of lujvo to be analyzed way down.

>Since you are using lojban a lot in your conversation sessions, it would be
>interesting if there was some way of keeping track of the tanru and/or lujvo
>you use. If you found a certain one being used periodically, it would be a
>good candidate for a lujvo. Recording and "deciphering" conversations may be
>difficult to do, but it is one way of establishing what's "common" and what
>isn't.

That is what the file of lujvo is for, with its frequency data. Thus far 
it is heavily dominated by the lujvo used by the 3 or 4 Lojbanists who post 
the most in Lojban. When I next update the file (probably in a couple of 
months), presumably a tendency to avoid lujvo in favor of tanru will result 
in only a small number of lujvo significantly increasing their frequency.

>This leads back to the bigger problem -- someone must achieve real fluency
>in Lojban, the sooner the better.

I think Nick has such fluency, and perhaps Goran and Jorge and Michael as 
well, given their volumes of written text composed on a daily basis (and 
who knows who else). But whether they have fluency in quite the same 
language is not all that clear until they are called upon to interact with 
each other in real time. The last such attempt was at the Worldcon in 
Scotland when Nick first demonstrated fluency, but at that point no one was 
quite up to following him in real time (though Nick now seems to thinks 
that Goran was not far from that level of skill).

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