Thesaurus categories

[cbmvax!uunet!MATH.UCLA.EDU!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!jimc]

Naturally :-) I applaud John Cowan's effort to thesaurus-ize the gismu
list.  As he indicated, the Carter thesaurus categories below 100 are
all for cmavo, and the categories will not be too useful for Lojban.

People may wonder how I chose those particular divisions for the gismu
categories.  I tried to split up the Old Loglan gismu into easily
learned lists of about ten gismu each, but with as much commonality of
place structures as I could find, as well as semantic similarity.
Thus, for example, "rutma-route" (now pluta) was in the motion word
category because it had motion word places, which in Old Loglan were
identical for almost all words -- even though "route" is semantically
tenuously related to the other motion words.

Of course, as new words were added some categories grew larger.
Repartitioning may be in order now.  One limitation was that the
encoding only allows nine subcategories in any larger category, a
problem in 420 "tools, machines and buildings".

Words were assigned in multiple categories because semantically they
belonged there.  A few categories such as 150 pull together words
whose "homes" are elsewhere, but which are useful for particular
purposes such as modal operators or dikyjvo.

I quickly discovered the impossibility of my goal, a "procrustean bed"
approach to place structures in which all words within broad categories
would have the same places.  However, many categories did fit this
model very well, such as the motion words, words for knowledge, parts
of objects, and directional properties.  And when I revised the
vocabulary for -gua!spi, sticking close to the Loglan model, I found it
useful and effective to modify a number of nonconforming words to match
their list partners.  My first contact with this generalization was
when I had to translate "flight path".  "fleti-fly" was a normal motion
word except that JCB had not provided a "route" argument.  After some
struggle with ridiculous tanru I realized that if I assumed a "route"
argument the converted result would be natural and obvious.

I recommend to Lojbab a wholesale application of this insight.  When
place structures are uniform (particularly as to ordering) it is much
easier to learn the words; and places which may not obviously be
relevant have a habit of being needed eventually.

                -- jimc