Subject: Re: [lojban] RE:literalism

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2000 08:37:21 -0400

At 07:21 PM 10/21/2000 -0400, [email-masked] wrote:
>Anyhow, general remark. Ultimately, if Lojban survives, literalism has to
>lose. The
>vocabulary of Lojban has to expand beyond the 6000 concepts or so that are
>encoded in the gismu in their various places. And there are only three ways
>to go: borrowing, creation, or metaphor (in the real -- not the JCB/Lo??an --
>way). Literalism can't add to the semantic field; at best it can reduce a
>new concept to an old one, making it not new at all (that is what I meant by
>saying that literal tanru and lujvo don't add to the language -- of course
>they add words and text -- but not concepts, except as subsumed under
>existing ones).

But per my other reply to pycyn, we HAVE expanded beyond the 6000 
gismu-encoded concepts. Indeed there are something close to 10000 lujvo 
out there in the file, and we've had another year of usage since I made 
that file up. The question is whether people coining new lujvo as they 
need them ever make up lujvo that are NOT analyzable by Nick's canonical 
rules is something that can be determined by actually doing the 
analysis. If Lojban can expand its vocabulary to cover all the concepts 
people feel they need in order to say what they want to say, using only the 
rules that have been made up, then those rules will stand as a complete 
set. If new lujvo are found in actual usage that don't fit the 
conventions, then either there will need to be new conventions, or we will 
agree that it is fine to have nonconventional words. I happen to share 
what I think is pc's sentiment that we should be able to have 
nonconventional lujvo, but the bottom line is that usage will prove the 
determining factor. "Let usage decide" has been our watchwords for such 
controversies before, and I think pc is the one who first said that.

So pc, for your argument to not be moot, we need some Lojban usage from you 
which includes nonconventional lujvo %^)

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