Subject: Re: [lojban] Chemistry

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 16:56:23 -0400

At 03:49 PM 04/27/2001 -0400, Pierre Abbat wrote:
>On Fri, 27 Apr 2001, Bob LeChevalier (lojbab) wrote:
> >I think you have it exactly right: chemical names are best expressed using
> >Mex, and Mex almost certainly is robust enough to handle it. You need to
> >define operators for the various forms of chemical interaction (we'll let
> >the chemists do that - there are plenty of ways to make operators). A
> >chemical formula is nothing more than a mathematical expression.
>
>Using mex sounds good. I think that we'll need to start using some cmavo 
>beyond
>CV and CVV for this, as cmavo space is pretty full, and most of the chemistry
>operators are different from mathematical ones.

Doesn't matter. You can create new operators at will, or redefine the 
mathematical ones. I doubt that new cmavo will be needed, but some could 
be "useful" for shortening very long expressions that occur often. But I 
would hesitate to try to define them until people are trying to communicate 
more than intermittently about chemistry, because every new word that is 
invented is something people will need to learn to understand what you are 
talking about, whereas reusing old words allows people to grok by analogy.

>The atoms of mathematical expressions are numbers; those of chemical
>expressions are atoms, as well as numbers. Elements have names which are
>brivla; they also have symbols, which are one or two letters. Then there are
>chemical groups, such as CHO and NH2 and CN, which have their own names. Any
>idea how to encode all this in mex?

lerfu-strings are sumti. mo'e converts sumti to operator, so mo'e lerfu 
can get you any chemical symbol; mo'e la benzin or mo'e le xukrbenzine 
could be a benzine ring

na'u converts selbri to operators and ni'e to operands; na'u jorne 
therefore can give you a chemical bond if you wanted to represent bonding 
in mex, or you could use multiplication and addition to express chemical 
subscripts and compounding (mo'e cy su'i mo'e obu pi'i re = CO2, if you 
want something fancier than cy obu re), and some lujvo could give you 
special bonding types. Everything that is needed is already there and all 
that is really needed are some conventions (these would be needed 
especially to represent complex organic names of the sort that appeared 
earlier in this thread).

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