Subject: Re: [lojban] Creating fu'ivla (was: NickFest 2)

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 12:47:04 -0400

At 10:40 AM 04/26/2001 +0200, Arnt Richard Johansen wrote:
> >The next area to be worked on are fu'ivla, which have hardly been
> >tackled. Nick advocates our collecting a fairly large set of easily made
> >fu'ivla for plants and animals, (and perhaps other common international
> >science words and foods), using the Linnean genus for each animal in the
> >Latin ablative case (which gives a consistent vowel ending.
>
>This whole business with "wholesale borrowing" worries me. It may be OK in
>cases such as Linnean names, element names, country names and language
>names, which are "namelike",

Which is precisely why we would borrow them wholesale (and these are the 
only categories where we are planning a wholesale borrowing except for 
foods). I am generally opposed to using borrowing/fu'ivla for any word 
that has usage that will make it more brivla-like than cmene-like, more 
prone to having more than one place (I am willing to consider 
the possibility of a clearly defined 2nd place or a word copying the place 
structure of a gismu).

But Nick noticed, as I had previously, that the largest bulk of new words, 
even lujvo, that are used in Lojban are used only in sumti, and never with 
an indication of any place structure other than the x1 implicit in the 
descriptive sumti. Not only does this make determining the meaning 
(including the place structure) of the word difficult without knowledge of 
the context, it renders us ever more behind in the task of defining these 
words dictionary-wise so that they CAN and WILL be used again by others 
(with the same meaning). For all the language is being used at a low rate, 
just on the list and in the couple of web sites like yours that I have 
processed, we are adding over a thousand new lujvo a year to the lexicon, 
all undefined. Meanwhile, newcomers of a less adventurous sort want word 
lists because they feel uncomfortable coining nonce words on the fly.

>But how about the other "common
>international science words"? Words such as "hypothesis", "visualization",
>"correlation coefficient" and "synchrotron" may be similar across
>languages, but that doesn't necessarily mean that borrowing them into
>Lojban would be a Good Thing. How should the place structure of such words
>be derived, if not individually?

They are is a problem, and require a tradeoff. For most words that are 
gismu and lujvo, in natural languages the words have multiple meanings or 
broad meanings. jargon words tend to have very specialized, almost 
name-like meanings in the field thay are used in, but are usually reusing a 
word that has a broad meaning as well.

Hence we have debates such as the ongoing one involving Lojban words for 
"computer program". No lay person from ANY language background will 
recognize this concept in a lujvo based on "immaterial-machine" (not that I 
would use "immaterial" for "virtual" myself - something based on 
pattern/model seems like a better basis than immaterial). We also have 
debates on the oblique place structures - I think I noticed a discussion on 
a possible x5 for the words for compiler going by a few days ago; even many 
people working in the field are not going to be able to figure out a 
consistent set of 5 metaphysically necessary places for "compiler".

I think for such jargon words, we will end up needing to have two or more 
words in the language for each concept, perhaps one in each subfield, plus 
broader ones with simpler information-hidden place structures that lay 
people will tend to use in a less jargony way. But creating these things is 
not easy, and it cannot be done wholesale. Yet when someone wants to write 
about a computer topic or other jargon-loaded field, that is precisely what 
the need to do, since they may need several dozen new words in order to 
write even one clear paragraph about their topic.

The international science words that I was referring to in my post are such 
things as words for other scientific units, and the things those units 
measure. How do we Lojbanically express a "joule", so as to keep it 
distinct from an "erg"? We can come up with a lujvo based on "nejni", and 
would probably use this one for a metric unit name, which leaves us at a 
bit of a loss for other units that are not the metric standards. How do we 
express "color", "charm", and "strangeness" as used in atomic particle 
physics? Anything based off skari or cizra is a loan-translation, and I 
dislike those in lujvo unless the source language metaphor is defining - 
you certainly won't be able to use the standard lujvo place structure words 
to come up with the places for "strangeness" from cizra, anyway.

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