Subject: Re: web dictionary development (was: Re: [lojban] NickFest 2)

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 01:35:30 -0400

At 11:02 PM 04/24/2001 -0600, Jay Kominek wrote:
>I think a couple of people looking over and discussing the construction
>of a lujvo is as good as grabbing it from a single person's in-context
>usage.

The difference is the classic dictionary writer's tension between a 
dictionary being descriptive or prescriptive. Dictionaries are supposed to 
describe actual usage, not theoretical possibilities. The first Lojban 
dictionary will necessarily have considerable prescriptive force (for the 5 
year period at least), but in the long term it too must become 
descriptive. A Lojban word that is talked about in English is not really 
Lojban (on the other hand, many of the words in the lujvo file are 
precisely words that were merely talked about rather than used - I used no 
filtering to process only Lojban words that appeared in Lojban text, since 
I don't have an automatic way to recognize text as being Lojban).

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