Re: 'lerfu' glosses

[John Cowan <snark!cowan@GVLS1.VFL.PARAMAX.COM>]

la karl. brk. cusku di'e

> 'lerfu' relates a specific glyph x1, from a named
> or indicated collection of glyphs x2, with a semantic interpretation x3.
> The x2 place is ambiguous; does it refer to an 'alphabet' (Roman, Cyrillic,
> Kanji, "Ogham") or to a specific encoding scheme (ASCII, EBCDIC, UniCode)?

Either, I think, without difficulty.  The alphabets are mere sets (well, not
really, they have order among other non-settish properties) whereas the
encoding schemes are mappings that can be reduced to sets by ignoring the
range of the mapping: the set is the mapping's domain.

> How many of these interpretations are correct?:
> "lerfu('A', ASCII, <letter A, a vowel>)" -- omitting ASCII encoding

This one looks fine.  ASCII is really a metonym for "the augmented set of
Roman characters which have ASCII assignments".

> "lerfu('A', ASCII, 0x41)" -- omitting other interpretation

Also OK.  You can think of the character code as being a semantic of a limited
kind.

> "lerfu(0x41, ASCII, <letter A>)" -- but then x1 is encoding, not glyph

Probably wrong.

> You could blur x1 to mean the glyph, the character, or (possibly) the
 encoding,
> and build tanru/lujvo if you need more specificity.  This should work in many
> cases;

Yes.  Really, I think that "le lerfu" is neither glyph nor character, but a
kind of Platonic essence.

> 'Character' has numerous other meanings in English which can cause
> confusion, but does (sloppily) incorporate the idea of binding a graphic
> symbol to an encoding.

Only for skami prenu.  The "rest of us" think it very odd to speak of letters
and numerals as "characters", which probably suggests either hanzi or
Damon Runyon types.

> 'Letteral' is cute, possibly a portmanteau from
> 'letter' and 'literal',

No, actually an analogical coinage on the basis number:numeral::letter:X.

> but it's obscure jargon and makes a bad gloss
> unless the word has been explicitly defined (and used often!) before
> it's encountered in the gismu list.

As Bob has said, almost all Lojban-specific words have jargon glosses:
>sumti< 'argument', >bridi< 'predication', etc.

--
John Cowan      cowan@snark.thyrsus.com         ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan
                        e'osai ko sarji la lojban.