more thoughts on lujvo

[David Cortesi <cbmvax!uunet!pucc.princeton.edu!infmx!godzilla!cortesi>]

I've been thinking further about the decipherability of lujvo.
No doubt others have already thought more deeply; still I want
to make some points that seem to me significant.

The basic question is: should it be, or should it not be, a goal
of Lojban design that /le lojbo lifri tecusku/ can grasp the sense
of a new (well-formed) lujvo the first time, without need of more
information from /le cusku/ ?

Either the affirmative or negative has strong implications, a few
of which I want to explore.

Take the affirmative. It seems to me that this necessarily means
that lujvo must be restricted to a starkly regular pattern of
arguments, probably nothing more than the argument set of the
terminal rafsi (same as tanru).  The reason is the mental burden
on /le tecusku goi ko'a/.  By the time /le jvovla goi ko'e/ arrives,
ko'a has already heard, parsed, and stacked in short-term memory at
least one, possibly more, sumti.

It seems to me already a difficult mental task to unpack the rafsi
of ko'e and recall the argument pattern of the last one.  If ko'a
also has to recall the argument patterns of the preceding one(s),
and to assort the pending sumti to different ones, and store also
the mixed pattern in short-term memory ready to receive the sumti
yet to come in the bridi -- ko'a is likely to drop all the balls.

Yet as Nick noted, this severely constrains the possibilities of
lujvo for expanding the language's scope.

Take the negative. It necessarily implies that
/le cusku poi zbasu le jvovla ku goi ko'i/
has an obligation to provide that extra information. (I fault
Nick for not doing this in his recent Aesop postings.)

Someday there should be a dictionary of accepted lujvo; ko'i need
not define any word in it. But to use a new-coined lujvo without
supplying a gloss should be at least bad manners, since it shows
that ko'i is speaking without  regard to whether ko'a understands.

Other problems impend: if the lujvo argument pattern is the choice
of ko'i, different writers will inevitably coin the same lujvo
with different meanings and arguments.  It's all very well to say
that "usage will determine which is best"; there will still be a
residue of old writings that use the non-surviving definitions.
These will become increasingly inaccessible with time. This seems
a shameful waste, but the only way to prevent it is to fix the
allowed lujvo constructions early.

What is worse, there could be contending usages that end in a draw,
so that there come to be entrenched stylistic "schools" of lujvo usage.
(yes, even despite the charitable, unegotistical attitudes so prevalent
in the world of conlangs... :-)

Return to the matter of the obligation on ko'i (remember him?) to
provide a glossary.  It seems to me an interesting question, whether
a lujvo can be defined _in Lojban_.  Has anyone every attempted to
write a definition of any word, in Lojban?  If the free-lujvo policy
is adopted, a conventional form for a glossary in Lojban is needed ASAP.

There is a middle ground, I suppose the one that jimc advocates: a
larger set of standard lujvo patterns, with pragmatic exceptions.
Yet he mentions "350" lujvo argument patterns, or cases?  Good grief.
My immediate(*) reaction to that was,

ganai mi djica le zu'o mi tadni le du'e nadikni valsi [kei?]
gi me tadni le fasban

Dave Cortesi

(*) all right, my immediate reaction was in English; this
sentence took several minutes of afterthought to assemble...