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response to Cortesi on regular lujvo and glossaries

Dave Cortesi writes:
>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/ ?

You've left out the important information, which is:  is there context
sufficient to inform of the sense.  How do you learn new words in
English?  Mostly by absorption.  You are reading along and digest the
new word from context, sometimes not even realizing that you've never
seen it before.  Other times you have to stop and think about it a bit,
and more rarely, look it up in the dictionary.  But there are many quite
fluent English readers/speakers that never look words up in
dictionaries.

Two examples: jabberwocky, where most of the words are 'new', yet the
poem seems to make sense, (and James Joyce, etc.) gives a good idea of
what the typical new Lojbanist goes through, except that the typical
Lojbanist isn;t running into new words at quite so high a rate fo
frequency.

Methodology example: how you analyze to learn a Latinate root-based word
meaning.  You take the roots apart analyze their meaning generally from
patterns you've learned for other words, then assimilate the compounds
together.  Anyone ever see the analyzed definition of
supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (atoning for overabundant, educable,
delicate beauty, I think the answer was).

>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.

The use of new, coined words in speech will probably be proportionately
much less than in writing, because the speaker has to do that too, in
order to build the word, in addition to the time to think up the tanru
basis in the first place.  In real time, it isn't practical to do this
all the time.  You rely on patterns that have worked before, and been
understood before.

When you do make up nonce words, it is obvious by the pause in
conversation, and if not, Lojban has the nonce word flag "za'e" to help
the listener recognize this as a 'hard' word.  Finally, in conversation,
you have feedback:  you can ask the speaker what the place structure
meant.  You usually will instead get a paraphrase, because explaining
place structures in Lojban is probably harder to produce and to process
than rephrasing.  IN practice, though, I have usually found that in
real-time speech, when I coin a nonce lujvo, I seldom have to do more
than identify the tanru, and people can get the rest from context -
learning the rafsi is far harder than learning however asystematically,
to make understandable lujvo.

IN written text, of course, you do not have the problem of overflowing
stacks. you drop the stack and reread after figuring out what the word
means.

Finally, the assumption of starkly regular patterns of argument
combining presumes something false as an assumption:  that the typical
Lojban speaker is going to know exactly the complete place structure for
every word.  I know less than 100 place structures well.  I can guess
accurately probably a few hundred more.  I have made and plan to make no
systematic attempt to learn them all.  Instead, I rely on my ability,
based on the English keywords that tell me what the word means, to guess
on the fly what the place structures are for the gismu themselves.  I
don;t worry whether I am wrong unless I am presented with a sumti that
makes no sense for the place structure I uhave guessed.  If I am the
listener, I try to figure out what a plausible place might be for an
unidentifiable sumti given the source tanru.  If I am the speaker, I
choose my tanru so as to clearly include all the places needed to relate
the sumti I wish to.

The bottom line is that the more experienced Lojbanists are NOT having
the problems you forsee.  We don't make lujvo unless we expect them to
be understood, either from simple pattern matching or sufficient
context.  More tricky lujvo, like the ones for mathematical terms, will
probably not even have defined place structures until included in the
dictionary.

>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.

Only in speech, and the result is a simple "ke'o". Lojban conversations
have a lot of "ke'o"s in them right now, with a moremajor reason being
that the listener drops the balls on a complex sentence because the
speaker hesitated too many times in composing the sentence that
the listener is afraid that they forgot something.  Quite typical when
the speaker tries a sentence beyond his/her level of competence.

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

Such restrictions would, and are impractical since people don't know all
the place structures anyway.

>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.)

That added information is usually context.  YOU know that ants don't
cause wheat, they might be able to cause dry-wheat from wet.  YOu choose
the meaning that makes sense.  Now indeed, a computer will be rather
less likely to understand LOjban with many nonce words - the language is
much more ambiguous semantically.  But it is still less ambiguous than
English.  People from other languages are able to learn that a railroad
is not a road, but a train or system that uses rails as roads.

I encourage people who make up nonce lujvo to post their proposed place
structures.  It is a good idea to do so, if people frequently
misunderstand your lujvo, since it allows someone to get a handle on the
types of things you are doing and to make suggestions (or at least to
get through the material if it is the message that is important).  But it
is not incorrect or wrong or impolite not to.  Several reasons.

1) Most important:  I WANT people to write Lojban text and to post
Lojban text, right or wrong.  Any added work that has to be done in
order to acceptably post material is liable to dissuade some people from
posting.  In Nick's case, he turns out massive chunks of text by Lojban
standards, and nearly all of his lujvo are nonce lujvo.  I will not ask
him to provide interlinear translations, complete definitions of lujvo,
or anything else.  He is using the language, and his writings, if not
perfect, are usually understandable.

2) Related to 1), and true, I believe, in Nick's case, is that not every
Lojban learner is interested in teaching the language.  A person
interested in teaching should explore ways of getting new ideas across
clearly.  Someomne like Nick, who is trying to explore style questions
(the neat thing about the Aesop postings is that they are direct from
the original Greek, and Nick presumably tried to capture the Greek
style.  If you want easy material, you should avoid Nick's stuff.  It
will never be unless he chooses to make it so.

3) If you want the nonce lujvo displayed in English, some people would
say this is rather impure an attempt to write Lojban.  If you have to
explain everything in English, Lojban isn't really a language, but a
code.  If it IS a language, then learning it will be subject to the same
problems as every other language - no two people will have the identical
vocabulary and dictionary of meanings in their minds.

4) If you want the nonce lujvo explained in Lojban, you must either
choose a fancy convention, or for most people, the definition will be
more complex than the original context. pc has formally attempted to
define a couple of gismu totally within Lojban.  He succeeded, but only
Nora and I could probably have understood what he wrote even with a
dictionary in hand.  I've done the same thing several times in
conversation when I don't want to lapse into English.  But even then,
neither pc nor I try to define the place structures in Lojban - the
concept is hard enough to get across.

5. In any moderately complex text, the definitions will be longer than
the text they presumably aid.

If you've looked at the typical bilingual dictionary, it does not give
definitions for the words - it gives an equivalent word.  You have to
use this information with disgression, of course - the grammar of the
word in the other language may be such that though the translation
match, the usage does not.  In a good translation/student's dictionary,
the definition that matters is typically very similar to a bilingual
dictionary, but with example sentences and maybe some brief
disambiguating notes - NOT elaborate explanations in either language.  I
would be surprised to ever see a Lojban English dictionary do even that
much - space and time to create being factors.  I see it as more
important to have more words with briefer definitions than fewer words
with comprehensive definitions.  If the Lojban dictionary is 800 pages
long and has only 5000 Lojban words in it, it isn't doing its primary
job.

>Someday there should be a dictionary of accepted lujvo; ko'i need not
>define any word in it.

Why would the existence of a dictionary matter?  The listener isn't
going to stop and look up the word in the dictionary.  You want to see
those balls in the stack drop:  just watch what happens when a Lojbanist
in conversation spends more than a small percentage of the time looking
up words in the gismu list.  Looking is a dictionary would be even
slower.

Furthermore, do you think that the speaker is going to look every
predefined word up in the dictionary and/or use it correctly every time?
Do you, a fluent English speaker, use every English word you know
correctly without fail.  You, Dave, as a professional writer - do you
look up even a significant portion of non-technical words when you
write?

I find it much harder to deal in Lojban with people's 'errors' in gismu,
than I do with errors in lujvo making or interpretation.  The only gismu
I urge people to concentrate on the place structures of, are those where
two places are sufficiently similar in typical content as to likely
cause confusion.  Thus it is important to know that in klama, the
destination comes before the origin, that with cinri, the x1 is the
interesting thing and the x2 is the observer, with cfipu, that the x1 is
the confusing thing and the x2 is the observer. fanva (translate) is the
worst of all, because the old baseline gismu list does not have an
adequate place structure for using the word, so NO ONE follows the
standard, and indeed I know that I've caught myself using two or three
different place structures for the word in conversation.  But yet, noone
has ever failed to understand one of my fanva sentences that I know of,
because I ALWAYS make sure that there is enough additional context.

(Providing context is not always an option, if le cusku is translating
rather than composing.  Aesop wrote very sparsely and vaguely, according
to Nick.  Unless he wants to produce an annotated translation or a
paraphrase, there WILL be difficult passages.)

A question, Dave.  What do you see and expect from a non-fluent English
spekaer who tries to talk to you?  Does such a speaker even noticeably
look up words in a dictionary when talking to you?  What do you do, when
such a speaker uses a word incorrectly by your knowledge?  You ask for
an explanation ONLY if you think you didn't understand.  And I'm sure
you can cope with the person who writes English and uses words
incorrectly, because most people write abysmally even when they are
fluent in speaking.  If you make the burden on a learning, non-fluent,
Lojbanist, more difficult than you require of an English speaker
speaking English, your expectations will drive everyone, including
yourself, from learning the language.

If you are talking about written text, you have a different problem than
with speech - no stack to worry about because you can reread as needed.
But with Nick's stuff, for example, I am still going to try to guess
what he means from context rather than from systematic rules.

>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.

Actually, you could also think of it as a compliment.  "ko'a" thinks
that "ko'i" is bright enough to sufficiently determine the intended
meaning from context plus the clues of the analytical source metaphor.

>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.

Ever read Chaucer or Shakespeare?   This will happen no matter what we do,
because:

1) gismu place structures will evolve

2) the nature of concepts will change, such that even knowing the place
structure might give you a misreading on the concept and its
connotations.

3) words will pass out of use and no longer be found in current
dictionaries, then 100 years later may reappear with a new meaning.
This is actually more likely in a constrained compound language like
Lojban than in a langauge like English.

4) Moist important:  people will make mistakes in place strctures even
of well-defined words.

Nick has reported that Zamenhof's Esperanto is now seen as archaic - he
uses words and phrasings that are no longer common or accepted.  He says
that the first 'great' Esperanto poet (Kobe?) wrote stuff that abounds
in word and grammar errors, but this has not diminished his stature.

>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...  :-)

This is only likely in a conlang that presumes that rules are supposed
to govern lujvo.  I oppose dikyjvo PRECISELY because I don't want them
set up as a standard by which other approaches are 'wrong'.  'Schools'
require rules.  (I understand that Esp-o does have such schools, by the
way, yet it doesn't seem to hurt the language.  Indeed, doesn't English
have MANY schools of usage and style for prose and poetry alike?  Even
at the level of word meanings and correctness (use of slang is verboten
for some, and then we can always get into differences between British
and American and ...  'schools' of English.  Want a lift?)

If two schools become totally implacable, you end up with two different
dialects, with each stigmatized in the eyes of the other.  We have Black
English and 'Standard American' English, as well as Serbian, and
Croatian in the news these days.

The standardization force is precisely the desire to be able to
communicate between schools.  If school A and B are so implacable about
the meaning of a word, then I suspect that neither will use it when they
SINCERELY WANT to communicate with each other.

Only if the two schools don't WANT to communicate with each other is the
split impossible to resolve.  Slangs and cants fall into this category.
A teenager doesn't really want his parents to understand the 'in'
dialect.

In short, what you fear is a standard feature of natural languages.  It
cannot be avoided, and it is a waste of time and effort to try to.
Lojban offers plenty of real advantages in disambiguity of grammar,
analytical metaphors, etc, to provide significant communicative
advantage over English.

A second standardizing force will be the dictionary writers.
Lexicographers try to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, but two
things interfere. 1) There is never enough space in the dictionary to
cover all the nuances, or all the words.  The choice of what to leave
out stigmatizes to some extent the words and meanings that are left out.
This is heightened by 2) the fact that most people treat a dictionary as
prescriptive even though no one writes dictionaries to be prescriptive.

I think, though, that you will find far fewer areas of disagreement in
Lojban word formation than in English word coining, and English is doing
quite well, thank you.

>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.

Yes.  Discussed above.  There have been several varieties of glossaries,
and we have explicitly provided two totally different ways within the
language (ta'u, and cei) that will deal certain desired features of a
glossary.

>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

You made three errors in words, but I understood it just fine (naldikni,
or na dikni; mi vs me and fasyban).  The kei is not needed because the
gi terminates all constructs back to the ga that it closes.

Note that with Lojban logical conditionals, this sentence makes no
implication at all about whether you want to study anything other than
excessive irregular words.

Of course, no Lojban words are irregular in the sense that French words
are, so if you want to study excess irregular words, you don't want to
study Lojban.  The degree of regularity in Lojban words probably exceeds
that of any natural language and most if not all conlangs (including
Esperanto) MERELY on the strength of the uniquely resolvable rafsi.

However, this brings to mind an issue people are ignoring.  At least
with lujvo you have a clue on place structures.  If you are so afraid to
guess (.iicai) a word's meaning and place structure, what are you going
to do when you run into a le'avla borrowing.  What is the place
structure of 'djarspageti'?

I want to note before closing that, even with the most regular of rules,
fully 90% of all Lojbanists will rarely if ever coin a lujvo.  It is the
poets who add words to English.  This will be true with Lojban as well -
most people will limit themselves to what they can look up in
dictionaries - except that a higher percentage of Lojbanists may be
pioneering spirits that will dare to risk saying something that might be
misunderstood, on the chance that they might just manage to be
truly understood.  That is the risk of poetry, after all.

The problems Dave and jimc ask about are real, but primarily so because
we have no dictionary, no fluent speakers to set authoritative examples,
no established processes and algorithms that make learning a language
seem simpler than it really is while obscuring real understanding.  If
you don't have the courage of the poet, it is probably too soon for you
to learn Lojban just yet.  But I have no doubt that anyone reading who
contemplates learning Lojban is perfectly capable of successfully being
a poet if they are willing to work at it, and are willing to be wrong
quite often until they have the tricks down intuitively rather than
algorithmically.

lojbab