Subject: Re: [lojban] Dictionary format

From: Robin Lee Powell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 11:00:48 -0700

On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 01:42:40PM -0400, Bob LeChevalier (lojbab) wrote:
[on using full-length dictionary entries]
> >and if we were actually trying to do a real dictionary, we'd need to
> >have entries, or sub-entries, for each of those meanings.
> 
> My original intent was to do exactly that, using a commonly available 
> dictionary as the source of word meanings. Given their availability, I 
> would probably use one of the out-of-copyright dictionaries now available 
> on the net, which would have such information for words and definitions 
> used prior to 75 years ago.
> 
> But space would make this impossible (even if the volunteers were 
> available) - the resulting text would necessarily be longer than the 
> English-only dictionary, since it would have all that text as well as the 
> Lojban. Printing costs are too high to include an English dictionary in 
> with the E-L dictionary.

Right.

Now, forget about lojban for a second.

<ignore lojban>

Normally, foreign language dictionaries just do a list of keywords,
right?

honour (n): foo(x1), bar(x2), baz(x3).

Where foo, bar, and baz are words in the other language, each of which
may more or less match the word 'honour' in english (a la the cf. list
in the lojban definitions), and the x? are the parts of speech in that
other language those words belong to, or what verb group they're in, or
something.

Then it is assumed that for explication the user goes to the long
definition in a dictionary _in_ _the_ _other_ _language_.

</ignore lojban>

Now, pretend that we had enough volunteers to do that. We could make a
dictionary of lujvo and fu'ivla in lojban (wherein we would probably
have the basic gismu and most of the cmavo as being assumed that the
user already knows them).

Then we could make a simple keyword based English <-> Lojban dictionary
that'd be short and stuff.

However, and correct me if I'm wrong lojbab, since we don't have enough
volunteers (and that may change once we get the web-based stuff going)
we're going to sort of mush the two concepts together and have a
dictionary where the Lojban -> English side is keyword based, but the
English -> Lojban side has full definitions.

Now this leads me to ask, lojbab, what information those 'full
definitions' will have. Will it just be a keyword in English and then a
place structure definition based on the gismu's places (i.e. what's
currently in the lujvo file) or will there be more than that? Are you
aiming for something like engdict.gis?

-Robin

-- 
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ BTW, I'm male, honest.
le datni cu djica le nu zifre .iku'i .oi le so'e datni cu to'e te pilno
je xlali -- RLP http://www.lojban.org/