Subject: Re: [lojban] Cultural fu'ivla

From: Robert LeChevalier <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 23 Dec 2000 19:00:43 -0500

At 04:27 PM 12/15/2000 -0500, Invent Yourself wrote:
>Is there a list of cultural/national/language fu'ivla?

No.

>Should we work on creating one?

IMHO, No. Lists of Lojban words that have not actually seen use are not 
particularly useful right now, unless there is a gap that one is 
specifically trying to fill. Since the list of culture names is open-ended 
and furthermore idiosyncratic to the individual cultures, it is impossible 
to come up with a complete list of culture words, especially based on the 
words for the culture used in that culture.

Furthermore, it seems to me against the whole concept of "borrowing" to do 
so in large scale, rather than on an ad hoc basis as needed. For right 
now, Type III fu'ivla, with the category tag, are sufficient for all such 
ad hoc usages. Type IV fu'ivla, being Zipfeanly shorter than Type IIIs, 
are justified when there is enough usage for a particular borrowing that a 
shorter word seems desirable.

The reason for proposing the fu'ivla gismu as an experiment was aimed in 
particular at the culture words, but the justification was the expected 
desire to be able to have combining forms for those words into 
lujvo. There is no similar justification other than Zipf (and therefore 
usage frequency) for Type IV fu'ivla.

If people want to learn how to make type IV fu'ivla, the place I would work 
would be in a domain in which I were specialized. For example, you xod in 
talking technically about computer topics in Lojban to other computer 
types, would use a lot of jargon that is best dealt with using 
fu'ivla. You would get tired of putting skamr- in front of every other 
word in your sentences. THAT is when you would feel a Zipfean need to take 
the most frequent of such fu'ivla and remake them as Type IVs. They would 
probably be used as Type IVs only by those who use the jargon a lot, but a 
few such jargon words that make it outside the field to the general 
language community would become the first general usage Type IV fu'ivla.

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