lujvo policy

[lojbab (Bob LeChevalier)]

jimc misunderstands or misrepresents our policy on lujvo.  Yes beginners
have difficulty now - they won;t always.  There will eventually be a
dictionary.  There is specifically NOT intended to be a method to map from
rafis to meanings, and my posting in response to Rosta may show why I
dislike any attempt at prescriptionist meaning assignment.

Rather, what is happening is that people are NOW making lots of lujvo.  We will
probably have to choose from several thousand byu the time our first complete
dictionary is assembled, perhaps even 10's of thousands.  When aspeaker makes
a new lujvo, he/she does not assume it to have some kind of permanent solitary
meaning.  We ask people to make lujvo trying to bear in mind that there could
ir usage
could determine the sole meaning for that word, but the lexicographers will look
closely at words for grossness before including them in the dictionary.

Thus making up a new Lojban word has all the 'risk' of using 'impact' as a verb
or doing any of the many ad-hoc derivations that we can do to make new words
on the fly in English - adding suffixes, compounding etc.  In many cases these
new words are ambiguous because there are multiple meanings for either the
root or the suffix, but we stilkl manage to understand English.  In Lojban,
you have the same thing, but the source words have only one meaning, so the
effort should be easier than for English (especially than for English by
non-native speakers).  This easierness (see I just made a new English lujvo
and you understand I hope) will be matched by a higher Lojban dependence on
creative (make that CREATIVE so jimc gets the emphasis - not algorithmic)
wordmaking to express new ideas.

New Lojbanist make very few lujvo even now, though.  You need to know the
rafsi and the lujvo-making algorithm, and this isn't lesson 1 skills we're
talking about.  Besides - until you are at least intermediate, you don;t even 
KNOW all the gismu, and there are a lot of beginning Lojbanists who end up
making lujvo when there is a gismu they didn;t know about that means the
same thing.

Finally, answering coranth - the key problem is that while the number of weords
that a person in a given language 'knows' is reltively constant, the selection of
words differs for each person.  There is no set of 20000 words that meets everybody's needs,and indeed probably by the time you get to the 100 active people
we have learning Lojban now, you need a vocabulary base of 50000 to cover all 
of their individual needs if each needs only 20000.  (Of course the limit 
mentioned is statistical, and some people have vocabularies over 100000 words
while others may have only around 10-20000)

lojbab