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Re: SNU: ki'e doi skot.



>That's a very poor standard. I know many (non-English-native) people with a
>rich English vocabulary but a terrible knowledge of English grammar; the net
>result of this combination is at most funny.
>
>Master vocabulary indicates good memory, not language proficiency.
>Furthermore, the gi'uste is only a part the vocabulary a person must
>memorize. What do you think is harder to remember, a single word "xorvo" or
>the list "{gugdrxrvatska,
>kulnrxrvatska, bangrxrvatska, ...}"? And words for those concepts must be
>known (or looked up) anyway when we want to express the associated concepts.
>
>I doubt mastering the gi'uste weighs more than 20% in measuring Lojban
>knowledge.
>This means that adding, say, 50 new gismu would make the language less than
>1% harder, if that much (no, I'm not proposing 50 new gismu, that's a
>hypothetical number).
>
>IMHO freezing the number of gismu means resigning to accompany the evolution
>of the concepts needed by human expression, therefore killing the language.
>If youdeny
>this, try to express "software" in Latin (Hmm, perhaps Nick wants to try :-)

1) Almost every analysis of semantic primitives in the various world languages,
as well as roots, etc. tends to come up with between 1000-2000.  Many so-called
primitive languages have even fewer.

2) why do I need to memorize Xxrvatska unless I am talking to someone about
Croatia, which in turn presumes that I know what/where Croatia is?  I think it
is likely that if I want to talk about a specific country, i can look up the
name of the country a couple of times.  Note that you DON'T need to memorize
 more than one word - it is "xorvo" or "-xrvatska" that you have to memorize.
I think it likely that -xrvatska is easier to memorize since you might
actually see it spelled like that somewhere else.

3) we are treading into an especially controversial ground with an example
from the cultural gismu.  There are some (Ivan for one) who feel we have
far too many cultural gismu in the first place - indeed that we shouldn't have
any.  Adding cultural gismu is thus something that gets higher resistance than
any other kind of gismu.

4) I think it is true that people will have to memorize a lot more than the
 gismu in order to be fluent users of the language, but in order to be
 NON-fluent
users, most of the gismu and a subset of the cmavo are fine (that is as far
as Jorge or I have gotten, for example).  The lujvo, if not memorized, can
be reconstructed for meaning on the fly from rafsi analysis, coupled with
context.  Likewise with fu'ivla.  I may not have the vaguest idea where
Croatia is, but i do know that gugdrxrvatska is a country - I do not
necessarily know that about xorvo.
  In the meantime, there is something psychological about having a long list of
words to memorize, and in my experience, ALL the difficulty in learning Lojban
is in the word list.  You can "fake it" on the grammar, on place strutures,
and rafsi (using 4 letter forms) but you still have to know the gismu and
some subset of the cmavo in rder to read any Lojban text.  My experience is
that learning the word list takes FAR longer than any other part of learning
the language, even with the able help of LogFlash (LogFlash took me some
2 months of an hour a day, and it would likely take 3 months now given the
increased number of gismu since Nora and I did that initial learning.)  I
should note that other than Nora and I, only 2 other people have ever
REPORTED completing a first pass through the words using LogFlash, and no one
besides me have reported getting to the 97% mastery level on the gismu list.
The payoff is that I seem to be one of the few who doesn't ever have to have
a wordlist in order to converse or read Lojban even though I haven't
actively used the language more than incidentallyin over a year and am getting
heavily crossfeed from my last 4 years working on learning Russian.

5)  The problem with adding gismu is "where do you stop?"  If you are to add
a word for Croatian, you might need one for every country of the world, and
then because of US dominance in the community, then maybe every state in the
US.  And that is just the cultural words.  How about jargon terminology like
software?  How many fields do you need to cover to thoroughly cover jargon?

And then why did we BOTHER to put in borrowing and compounding methodologies
into the language.  There are literally BILLIONS of lujvo with less than 4
terms, just waiting to be discovered; there is no language on earth with a
significant fraction of that total.  They might not help with Croatia
(or maybe they would - you could make some appropriate lujvo from
X-Y-South-Slavic, where Goran and friends chose the X and the Y to be
meaningful and non-offensive to their culture).  But outside of culture-
specifric words, the language SHOULD be quite robust enough to handle concepts
internally.  If it is not, we have more wrong than the set of gismu.

But seriously, we DID have the problem of "where to stop" a few years ago.
As long as we had not said "no more", then every couple of weeks a new gismu
was proposed.  Each was duly debated at great length, and most debates were
totally inconclusive.  (Sound familiar from the current grammar discussions?
Then you know why we want to freeze on prescribing grammar!)  The last
gismu votes were true parodies, with people giving blanket votes and
proxies to vote yes or no on all proposals as a matter of principle.  Since
then, we decided to not have such votes take place in the formal meetings of
the LLG, but still when half the community is voting totally on the basis
of principles unrealted to the specific proposal, we have gone far beyond
the point where meaningful debate is useful.

6) Then there is the problem of standardization.  I'm not worried if we miss a
lujvo of fu'ivla or two in compiling the dictionary, but we cannot miss any
gismu.  JCB had a real problem with gismu making during his dominance.