Subject: Re: [lojban] Dictionary format

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 14:30:46 -0400

At 11:00 AM 04/18/2001 -0700, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
><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).

The current lujvo definition format assumes that the users know or can look 
up the gismu place structures to find out what the x3 of klama is when it 
becomes the x4 of some lujvo based on klama.

>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.

Right now the plan is to have the Lojban-> English side resemble the gismu 
and cmavo lists, and the English->Lojban side be essentially the same 
thing, but some of the end-of-the-line cross-reference notes removed.

>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?

The long term goal for the English side is the longer form definitions of 
engdict.gis. But for the first edition of the dictionary, I would rather 
have more words with the current lujvo file format (modified automatically 
to reduce the white space) than fewer words with the engdict.gis format. I 
feel that an English-Lojban dictionary first of all needs to have as wide a 
semantic coverage as possible in order to get more people using the 
language who are not confident at making understandable 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