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Re: Simple Lojban questions
Andrew Sieber:
>"The first time I met my wife was in high school,"
le nu mi pare'u penmi le mi speni cu cabna le nu kulzva
My first meeting with my wife was at the time of attending school.
That doesn't say that the one you're referring to as {le mi speni}
was your wife at the time of the meeting. You can, if you want,
emphasize that it is your current wife by saying {le mi ca speni}.
My first attempt was:
mi pare'u penmi le mi speni ca le nu kulzva
But that doesn't work, because it says that the event {mi penmi
le mi speni ca le nu kulzva} happens for the first time. It allows
for my having met her many times before attending school. This
kind of thing that has to do with scopes is always tricky in Lojban.
Selbri tenses and negation have wider scope than ca-le-nu
clauses, which is different from what would be the direct
translation into English.
If you insist on using lo:
le nu mi pare'u penmi lo mi speni cu cabna le nu kulzva
"The event of my meeting at least one of those who really
are/were/will be my wives happens at the same time as
the event of attending school."
Again you can be more precise: {lo mi ca speni} = "at least
one of those who are currently my wives".
In fact, the most difficult one would be to translate "my then wife".
For example, how would we say: "I gave the cat to my then wife"?
Now that I think about it, I don't know whether in {mi pu dunda
le maltu le mi ca speni} ca means at the time of speaking or at the
time of the giving.
>Why can't selbri be the first word in a bridi?
They can. If you then want to fill the x1 place you must use fa.
For example:
jitfa fa le du'u na ka'e pamei lo selbri valsi le jufra
It is false that a selbri word can't be first in a sentence.
> If the selbri were
>first, then a listener could immediately know what relationship is being
>described, and could know what each sumti was being used for as the
>sentence was being heard.
Indeed, that's why when the first argument is long (usually an event
or a predication) then it is customary to put the selbri first.
>Allowing the selbri to be the last word in a
>bridi forces a listener to retain a potentially long string a sumti in
>short term memory until the selbri is finally heard, at which point the
>listener must mentally fit together all of the sumti just heard, placing
>a large burden on the listener for all but very short bridi.
It would certainly be bad manners on the part of the speaker. When
the first arguments are short, on the other hand, they can be put first
without any problem. For example:
xu do mi tugni le du'u dei jimpe frili jufra
Do you agree with me that this is an easy-to-understand sentence?
>"skami pilno" can mean a user of computers, or it can mean a computer
>that is also a user. Why is this ambiguity allowed in a supposedly
>unambiguous language?
Lojban's semantics are not unambiguous, I don't see how they could be.
What is supposedly unambiguous is its syntax, so that you can't have
things like "time flies like an arrow" where you don't know whether "flies"
is working as a verb or a noun, etc.
>Also, as I understand it, "sampli" has a definite
>meaning, unlike the ambiguous "skami pilno". Are such lujvo always
>unambiguous, or are they only unambiguous when they happen to be
>specifically defined in the dictionary?
They will be unambiguous once they've had enough usage that we can
determine their meaning. For the time being we can say that the speaker
intended it to have an unambiguous meaning. If it catches on, that's what
it will end up meaning.
>If they are always unambiguous,
>what is the method used to decide which "interpretation" will be
>correct?
Basically, the x1 of the lujvo will be given by the x1 of the last
component,
and all the other arguments should be present in the lujvo, or if absent
then accounted for by being filled with an argument of another component.
That's my method, there are others. (One other method is to let your
whim of the moment dictate what it means.)
>Does Lojban have separate words for the nucleus of an atom, the nucleus
>of a biological cell, the nucleus (kernel) of a computer operating
>system, etc?
It could. For example: ratmidju, ji'erslemidju, samymidju.
> If so, does it have a general word that means "the center
>or middle part of something" that is not used to refer to the middle of
>any one specific thing?
I think you mean {midju}.
>Does Lojban have separate words for the metric prefixes for base two and
>base ten numbers?
It does for the SI prefixes: 10 to the 3, 6, 9, 12, etc. It doesn't have
gismu
for the base two ones, although there's no reason not to form a lujvo if
required.
>Ie. in English, "kilo" can mean 1000 or 1024, "mega"
>can mean 1000000 or 1048576, etc, and the correct meaning must be
>figured out from the context. Does Lojban resolve this ambiguity?
kilto is only 1000. There's no gismu for 2 to the 10th power.
>Is there any information anywhere about letter frequency in Lojban?
I think that someone calculated them in the context of Scrabble, so
they probably were dictionary frequencies rather than usage
frequencies. It shouldn't be too hard to calculate them from the
archive texts. I think there's plenty of it for that purpose.
>The
>reason I ask is that I am currently considering learning the Dvorak
>style keyboard layout to replace qwerty (which I currently use), due to
>the fact that it is almost universally considered superior to qwerty in
>terms of typing speed, accuracy, and comfort. However, if I begin
>typing a lot of Lojban in the future, the Dvorak style may not be
>optimum; after all, Dvorak designed his layout to be optimal for the
>English language.
You must be joking. Are you really planning to type in Lojban
more than in English, or at least such a significant amount that
it would affect your decision to learn the Dvorak style? Well then
hurry up! We urgently need that level of Lojban text production.
Our current collective typing speed must be in the order of a
hundred words a year...
co'o mi'e xorxes