TECH: Higley on lujvo, and general-purpose brivla

["Mark E. Shoulson" <shoulson@CTR.COLUMBIA.EDU>]

Higley makes a good point, and it touches a little on something that I've
been thinking about a lot myself.  I mentioned this to Nick once in an IRC
discussion.  I feel that a lot of the lojban text written suffers from
overuse of lujvo owing to a tendency to try to reproduce the specificity
afforded by natural-language terms.  I try to use more tanru than lujvo,
and to be as non-specific as I can, while still saying what I want to say
(with a few exceptions; e.g. I don't use {prenu} as "person" in the English
meaning of "human being"--that's a "remna".  {prenu} is more of "thinking
being" or even "soul" (minus the religious and non-bodily connotations)).
So I avoided Nick's {be'ipre} for "waiter": what did the {prenu} rafsi add?
The waiter is just "that which carried the coffee": {le bevri be lei
ckafi}.  Sometimes you may need to be more specific, that's okay.  But I
think you'll find that you don't need to be specific as often as you might
think at first.  That the {bevri} was also a {prenu} gets cleared up later,
when conversation is initiated.

Higley's view of lujvo as "abbreviations" rather than "fixed tanru" is very
cogent and, I suspect, very close to the official view of what lujvo should
be.  His example, {le'avla} is a good example.  After all, {le'avla}
expands to {lebna valsi} which is "take word" or better, "taker word"--a
word which is somehow associated with a taker, perhaps.  A more pedantic
jvozba would have made it {selyle'vla}, for {se lebna valsi}: "taken-thing
word", much closer to the meaning: a word which is taken.  Note, though,
that that's not what we use, nor should it be: you can't trust an expanded
lujvo 100%, you can only assume that it's close to what the lujvo means.
Lujvo are intended to be dictionary words, having their own definitions not
precisely derived from their associated tanru (the selpinxe/se pinxe
problem I had before is another good example.  {selpinxe} is a good lujvo
for {na'o se pinxe}, i.e. a beverage, as opposed to just plain {se pinxe}
which could mean {ca'a se pinxe}, liquid-thing-sliding-down-someone's-
throat.)

More on the elimination (and desirability thereof) of unneeded specificity
later, when I feel like it.

~mark