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

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2001 01:33:39 -0400

At 09:44 PM 8/15/01 +0000, Jorge Llambias wrote:

>la maikl cusku di'e
>
> >maybe it's because we talk about weight as well as mass, the former being
> >more important for everyday speech, but the latter being more
> >fundamental.
>
>That would explain why there is a word for weight instead
>of one for mass, but it doesn't explain why there is a
>word for either one of them at all. Other properties like
>size, length, etc. didn't get a special word.

I believe it was indeed included because of the weight/mass distinction 
(with mass being ni marji, IIRC). Most of the other things that can be 
measured are not subject to this potential confusion, and were presumed to 
be expressible as ni abstractions, or klani/tergradu. I specifically aimed 
to cover all the major SI units with words for both the unit and the thing 
measured, but the latter method usually worked. junta could have been ni 
tilju, but I remembered how easily lay people confuse mass and weight and 
left junta in for Zipfean reasons.

BTW, noting that Lojban defaults to using SI units in measurement, I 
intended that you can express such messes as g m/sec**2 (newton?) as lujvo 
based on such tanru as ni bapli [kei] gradu and acceleration as ni sutra 
cenba [kei] gradu.

This seemed better than JCB's approach, which in 1986-7 included adding 
gismu for "volt" and other commonly used units, though those additions seem 
not to have made it into his revised Loglan 1 gismu list.

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