Re: current cmene project

[Logical Language Group <lojbab>]

UC> I think there's a fundamental difference between cmene and fuhivla,
UC> whether they're nonce or conventional. The difference between nonce and
UC> conventional concerns the interlocutors' knowledge of the word, while the
UC> difference between cmene and fuhivla concerns the way the semantics of
UC> these words work: fuhivla have definitions, while cmene only have
UC> definitions in that 'la X' means 'lo thing-named-"X"'. Any conceivable
UC> cmene already exists in Lojban, since Lojban fully specifies the meaning
UC> of the cmene, whereas a nonce fuhivla is a genuine innovation in the
UC> language, because of the novel meaning.

1.  The definition of nonce/conventional also concerns the extent to which
a word is established in the Lojban community, which, rather than any dictionary
must eventually come to be the standard for what "is" Lojban (at least if what 
we are doing has any linguistic merit.  We aren't even fixing the gismu
semantics in concrete, thoughh they are a lot more solid than fu'ivla 
definmtions at this point.

Thus conventional can only refer to that which has been adopted by the
community, rather than by individuals.  Nonce words might be made up and
even spread to a part of the community before being rejected/superseded by
other's ideas - they are still "nonce" in that they have not been
accepted at-large, but they are no longer merely tied to a single 
interlocutor.

2.  I want as many decisions about semantics to be made by Lojban speakers
who are actually USING the language.  All of us, even Nick and I as the
best speakers/writers in the language, are still primarily thinking in some
other language other than Lojban.  We are not yet qwualified to make
decisions as "Lojban speakers", and the language is still being prescribed
from outside.

3. I think you have a fundamental misconception of the intended semantics
of fu'ivla as distinct from cmevla.  First of all, the kinds of cmevla
we have been talking about ARE fu'ivla, just not fu'ivla brivla.  My 
writings about fu'ivla have alwatys talked about type 1,2,3,4 etc. fu'ivla.

Type 1 is other-language quoted text
Type 2 is cmevla
Type 3 is the kind of fu'ivla we have been talking about with classification
tags
Type 4 is the kind of fu'ivla that don't have tags, of which there are none
yet defined in the language (the cultural gismu are the closest to these)
but they will have the choice of the largest area of fu'ivla space.  They just
cannot reliably be made up ad hoc, and we will NOT make one up and verify its
validity unless there is enough usage to demand it  (though I may  come
up with a few examples for the dictionary merely as EXAMPLES, probably from
among the non-gismu culture names).

The idea is that most fu'ivla will, as you have more-or-less imploied, be
referents to very specific concrete things.  I expect most fu'ivla to serve
the roles of "nouns" in Lojban, rather than as main selbri.  The types of words
that will rate Type IV status will be those that are usefull in the full
range of gramamtical positions of a brivla, AND are frequent enough to make 
the Zifean shortening justifiable.  These will also, probably be those
that have come to have the broadest (or loosest) semantics of the fu'ivla,
since frequency o use itslef will tend to cause some divergence in meaning
as people's concepts of word meaning differ, and to some extent the differences
between what in English are different parts of speech tends to cause some
amount of meaning modification  (for example, English table becomes in
Lojban "jubme", which also has a sense of "table" as a verb - we have used 
it around here in such a capacity, such as when someone eats in the living
room with "lo stizu cu jubme gi'o se cpana le sanmi".

If we do adopt your argument that a cmevla is just "lo cmene be da bei de
then it is even more clear that the semantics of cmene are not far removed from
any other place of any other brivla.  And when we have "me" to turn any
cmene (or any other sumti) into its corresponding brivla, it takes more than hy
hypothetical argument to justuify using the more difficult to mange fu'ivla
space so lightly.

lojbab