On lujvo
I'd like to make a few comments on nu jvozba1. As I've read,
the current policy of la lojbangirz is "Let a thousand flowers bloom."
While at first I was opposed to this, I now see the wisdom of it: How
could it be otherwise? I've decided after much thought to disband the
lujvo pulji1 and let the prisoners go.
1nu jvozba "lujvo-making"; lujvo pulji "lujvo-police"
But this doesn't mean that I don't have anything to say on the
topic of nu jvozba! Au contraire, mon fr
re! I have actually come
180x from my old viewpoint: I'd like to suggest DD since "suggest" is
really all I can do DD that a different view of lujvo be adopted.
As I understand it, a lujvo, as currently defined, is a tanru
that has been "compressed" into a single word, and that has been
assigned a fixed meaning. (And I guess a new place structure, as
well.) Thus the essential difference between the tanru "remna sovda"
and the lujvo "remso'a" is that the former does not have a fixed
meaning, it might mean "the human's egg", i.e., the one he had for
breakfast, or it could mean the same thing as (what I'm suggesting
for) remso'a, namely "human ovum", i.e. the female human reproductive
cell.
I see lujvo more as "abbreviations" than "fixed tanru": I don't
think a lujvo has to be so exact that its meaning is crystal clear.
Then we'd have huge lujvo. I see the parts of a lujvo as forming a
"memory hook" which can be used to remember its meaning, and which,
knowing the concept, can be used to remember the lujvo. I don't think
that, seeing a lujvo on a page, you should instantly be able to know
what it means. Rather, finding out what it means, you should then be
able to more easily remember it. Case in point is "le'avla". This is
a word well-known to Lojbanists, but let us assume that we've never
seen it before. Would you know what it meant, just by looking at it?
You could rely on the context in which it occurs, but what if there
were no context, or what if the context wasn't informative enough?
You could probably make some educated guesses, butlet's face it,
"le'avla" is not a very clear lujvo as lujvo go. Expanding it into a
tanru is just as unhelpful: "lebna valsi" is just as nebulous. And
yet I'd like to argue that this is just exactly how lujvo should be
made! Once you discover the meaning of "le'avla", you aren't likely
to forget it: You can now see why it means what it does. This is
similar to the process that goes on with an abbreviation, although
thankfully lujvo have clearer parts than abbreviations. You can't
necessarily figure out the meaning from the abbreviation, but you can
figure out the abbreviation from the meaning. With lujvo, it might be
more accurate to say that, given a list of lujvo, you could pick out
the one that corresponds to the concept in question.
"General Purpose Lujvo"
One of the reasons why I don't do much translating from English
to Lojban, or from Welsh to Lojban, is that in order to do this with
any reasonable degree of accuracy, you have to make lujvo. Well, I do
make them, but I usually don't start out with an English or Welsh word
or concept that I'd like to translate into English. I start out with
the gismu list and just start combining, trying to see which combin-
ations suggest meaningful concepts. This is how I arrived at the idea
of "General Purpose Lujvo".
While making lujvo in this way, I'd often come across a word
which had no exact equivalent in English, but which seemed to be use-
ful nevertheless. A good example is "zaltapla". This is anything
ground up and made into a patty. It doesn't have to be meat, doesn't
even have to be food. If you're eating a hamburger, and you call it
le zaltapla, you aren't likely to be misunderstood, and you can always
get more specific if you want. I find that this makes Lojban much
more interesting, because it divides the semantic space in a
different, perhaps "Lojbanic" way, and it helps me to think "Lojban-
ically". If you wanted to say "That hamburger looks good" in Lojban,
you're likely to try to make the word for "hamburger" very specific.
While there's nothing wrong with this DD clarity is a good thing DD I
think doing this makes Lojban no more than a code into which we trans-
late the pre-existing concepts of other languages. With GPL, or even
lujvo that are unique, but with specific meanings (SPL "Specific Pur-
pose Lujvo"?), we can build a language that is not just a code, but a
living language of its own, that divides the semantic space in its own
way.
Greg Higley