pocket dictionary

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>]

George Foot asked about the pocket dictionary.

The idea for this came from people appreciating the ad hoc pocket dictionaries
that Nora and I prepared for our own use the last time we taught a Lojban
class.  Sparse but quite convenient, we ended up making 10 copies of these,a
and 9 were distributed (the last was damaged and is unusable) to first
requesters.

These pocket dictionaries consisted of nicely formatted gismu and cmavo lists
in Lojban order, rafsi lists, and EBNF and YACC grammar.  For the publication,
we would add some level of English order listing, but it will be much shorter
than the draft-dictionary file now on our ftp site.  At this point we do not
plan to include any lujvo lists (except insofar as they appear by reference in
the gismu list).  We can consider a broief thesaurus listing, but this might
have to wait for the full dictionary.  There have been at least 3 attempts
to thesaurusize the gismu, but all were in the early pahses of the project and
have considerable flaws.  Indeed, the thesaurus concept is ill suited for
a predicate language - "klama" for example must go under a verb (go/come) as
 well as under each of its five places (go-er, destination, origin, route and
 mode),
by which time it is properly scattered on so many pages as to be difficult to
use.  The current gismu list has a roster of notes "see also ..." that acts as
an informal thesaurus.

The important point about the poicket dictionary is to make it pocketsize and
portable.  The full dictionary is likely to be a multivolume (hopefully only
2 but we'll see) tome - the last page count that I had was over 1300 pages
and growing significantly in the future.  This will not be small, nor will it
be cheap.  the pocket dictionary should be more reasonably priced.

Since most of thge parts of the pocket dictionary are more or less done,
the prinary job is editing and formatting it into a single book-document.
The full dictionary needs a bit more work, because of the low confidence
level that the cmavo and lujvo lists as they exist now are adequate for a
full dictionary.

lojbab
----
lojbab                                                lojbab@access.digex.net
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                        703-385-0273
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