tanru/lujvo

[cbmvax!uunet!gnu.ai.mit.edu!grackle!bob]

nsn%mullian.ee.mu.oz.au says

   What's going to be decisive is how people regard lujvo. Latent in
   how you and lojbab treat them is, I think, the concept that a lujvo
   is a "new word".  Latent in djim.'s pan-predicatism and my distrust
   of extraneous places is the concept that a lujvo is just an
   abbreviation, semantically and syntactically equivalent to a tanru.

This is a good insight.
However, it may be the wrong distinction on which to focus attention.

 * Consider a tanru:  to understand a tanru, a listener must select
   one of several possible meanings.  A tanru contains *less*
   information than a full sentence using the concepts.

   For example: `the blue nest'.  Do I mean the house for the blue
   aliens who live down the street?  Or the bluebird's nest?  Or
   Horace's house, which is painted blue?

   A tanru requires semantic disambiguation.

 * Consider a lujvo:  derived from a tanru, a lujvo could be
   considered an abbreviation of a tanru.  But I don't think that
   people will use lujvo that way.  I think that people will use
   lujvo as if they were single words, just as in English, we use
   `understand' as a single word.  

   My expectation is that a lujvo will become limited to just one of
   its many possible tanru-derived meanings; or at least, to as few
   meanings as a gismu.

   (This is a hypothesis, testable after lots of people learn to speak
   Lojban.)

nsn%mullian quotes John as saying

   >The whole purpose of lujvo, as opposed to tanru, is to "freeze"
   >some of these decisions so they do not have to be thought out on
   >the fly.

and responds

   Yes, but without a good way of guessing lujvo meanings, they're too
   much of a hassle. I'm not memorising any dictionaries.

No more of a hassle than learning English.  As a child, you learned
thousands of words of your native language; learning lujvo and gismu
is similar, except that learning a second language as an adult is
harder (or seems harder) than learning a second language as a small
child.  But lujvo may be easier to learn than gismu (once you have
learned gismu) since the specific meaning of a lujvo is one of the
multiple interpretations of the tanru from which the lujvo derives.
(Another topic for someone to research!)

Freezing meanings is very important.  The more ambiguity in a
sentence, the harder it is to understand.  (Yet another hypothesis and
yet another research topic!)

    Robert J. Chassell               bob@gnu.ai.mit.edu
    Rattlesnake Mountain Road        (413) 298-4725 or (617) 253-8568 or
    Stockbridge, MA 01262-0693 USA   (617) 876-3296 (for messages)