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Re: response to Cortesi on regular lujvo and glossaries
- To: John Cowan <cowan@snark.thyrsus.com>, Ken Taylor <taylor@gca.com>
- Subject: Re: response to Cortesi on regular lujvo and glossaries
- From: CJ FINE <cbmvax!uunet!pucc.princeton.edu!C.J.Fine>
- In-Reply-To: <no.id>; from "Logical Language Group" at Dec 8, 91 6:17 am
- Reply-To: cbmvax!uunet!pucc.princeton.edu!C.J.Fine
- Sender: Lojban list <cbmvax!uunet!pucc.princeton.edu!LOJBAN>
lojbab answers Cortesi:
>
> 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.
>
Lovely examples from my recent experience: 'dissensus' (which I have
come across several times in reading for my course, but have not yet
found in any dictionary), and 'immiserate' (which I did in fact look up in
a dictionary, but te meaning, as with 'dissensus', was obvious).
>
> >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.
Besides lojbab's answer, I would point out that arguing on the basis of
short-term memory requirements is very suspect. The plight of the
interpreter from German is well known ("I'm waiting for the verb!") and
I find German separable prefixes particularly trying (for those
unfamiliar with this, it is as if we expressed an English sentence like
"He will forgo the <some very long sumti>" as
"He will go the <the same sumti> for"!)