TECH: Lujvo Place structure paper

[Ivan A Derzhanski <iad@COGSCI.ED.AC.UK>]

This issue of lujvo argument place structures has always bothered me greatly.
We have a list of a long but finite number of gismu, each of which has
a place structure determined by design, and we can always be sure what
an argument of a gismu stands for, and if I find out that someone else
has a different idea about that, I know that one of us is wrong; for
no one may decide on its own what an argument place of a gismu is to
indicate, any more than one may invent and use a new gismu.

Ditto for tanru, where, although the precise meaning of the whole is
left to the discretion of the speaker who uses it, the argument place
structure is defined to be the same as the one of the last component.

But I'm very uncomfortable with the idea that a lujvo `unambiguously
expresses a specific chosen relation out of the many an ambiguous
tanru can convey' and with the possibility for it to have any place
structure.  Who is to determine which of the many meanings of the
tanru will be the meaning of the lujvo and what its place structure
will be?  Is it the case that whoever happens to use a lujvo for the
first time thereby definitely changes the language?  For surely his
doing so will lead to the effect that something which would have been
correct on the day before (_viz._ a different use of the same lujvo)
will be incorrect on the day after.  But this is absurd.

(I have created a number of lujvo myself in my Lojban writings, but I
have never done so with the conscience that I am obliging everyone who
might use the same lujvo later on to use it in the same tanru meaning,
and all of my lujvo have the place structure of the last component.)

The alternative is for the free coining of lujvo to be outlawed, and
for the Lojban Central to be assigned the task of coming up with, say,
50000 lujvo, complete with place structures, which will be the only
ones to ever be used.

I think little of a language whose vocabulary can be productively
expanded by items with unique yet unpredictable meanings.

Ivan