Subject: Re: [lojban] selma'o considered harmful

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 07:48:47 -0400

At 11:25 PM 8/13/01 -0700, Nick NICHOLAS wrote:
>cu'u la lojbab. sera'a zo selma'o
> >It is bogus from the standpoint of rigorous tanru/dikyjvo etymology, but
> >this is a case where a lujvo through usage does not strictly mean what its
> >etymology suggests. selma'o was coined as a word for "lexeme" when dikyjvo
> >did not exist and it is thoroughly ensconced in our literature with that
> >meaning. I think it is now a little too late to do to selma'o what we did
> >to kunbri (now selbri, and the former is long forgotten) and le'avla (now
> >fu'ivla, but you can still find the former sometimes).
>
>1) Our literature? You mean, the literature I'm currently reediting?

No. The several million bytes of Lojban text representing actual usage.

>2) selma'o ensconced as 'lexeme'? As in the Book, 2.18's definition?
>
>#selma'o:
># a group of cmavo that have the same grammatical use (can appear
>#interchangeably in sentences, as far as the grammar is concerned) but
>#differ in meaning or other usage. See Chapter 20.
>
>Or Chapter 20 thereof, which lists only cmavo?
>
>The occasional *and incidental* mention of selma'o BRIVLA in Chapter 21,
>in that case, can
>readily be treated as an erratum.

It can be "treated" as an erratum only if it is an error. But since the 
word was chosen for that "incidental usage" based on its perceived meaning 
by the person who used it (me) because at the time nobody gave a damn 
whether words fit into nice little analytical boxes with predicted 
meanings, and because I am resolutely a descriptivist and not a 
prescriptivist about word meanings, I don't consider it an erratum.

>The lexemes of Lojban are neither
>selma'o nor vlalei, but vlagenkle: word grammatical class. (The vlalei is
>a more generic, morphologic class.)

Fine. Invent another new word to make a distinction. It is a very Lojbanic 
thing to do. But lujvo need not be analytic.

>3) Never mind dikyjvo: if a selcmavo is not exactly the same thing as a se
>cmavo, then what language *are* we speaking?

If it is exactly the same thing, then why bother making a lujvo for it?

selcmavo is just a word. It means whatever we want it to mean and whatever 
it is understood to mean in the contexts in which it is used. We've gone 
some 10 years with that little text in the beginning of the formal grammar 
of lesson 21 that you call an "erratum", and everyone who read it 
understood what a "BRIVLA selma'o" was. No one until now questioned 
whether BRIVLA could legitimately be called a "selma'o" or even sought a 
formal definition of "selma'o"

Furthermore as the person who first coined the word "selma'o" as a 
translation for the Loglan art-term "lexeme" (which may not have much to do 
with other English uses of the word "lexeme" %^)

>I'm unconvinced selma'o as used to mean 'lexeme' is not an error.

There is no such thing as an error in word usage, if it successfully 
communicates. It is metaphorical to liken these non-cmavo word categories 
to "se cmavo". Maybe only Helsem and me think that metaphorical usages in 
Lojban are tolerable.

(Be that as it may, I would descriptively define selma'o in the dictionary 
as "a category of cmavo, metaphorically extended to included the few 
non-cmavo word categories as well". This does not rule out the possibility 
of using the other word-category lujvo that people are suddenly coining, 
assuming that people decide that they want to use them. But I daresay that 
they will not catch on so long as they aren't used for ALL word categories, 
with "selma'o" disappearing from normal use EXCEPT when it is specifically 
linking a cmavo with its word category in a manner which makes that exact 
brivla the particularly appropriate one.)

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