reply to very old question

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

>From: Andrew Sieber <absieber@eos.ncsu.edu>
>Subject:      Simple Lojban questions
>
>Hello all- I haven't learned Lojban yet, but I plan to sometime in the
>near future.  I've only spent a couple hours glossing over the reference
>grammar, and I've got a few questions about the language.

Thanks to pc for his answers to most of these.

>In English, if I say, "The first time I met my wife was in high school,"
>I am most likely referring to the person who is now my wife, but she was
>not, of course, my wife while I was in high school.  However, the
>English sentence is strictly interpreted as meaning that I was already
>married to her before I even met her, and the first time I met her was
>in high school.  Is it possible to say something ambiguous like the
>above in Lojban, or does Lojban force you to choose which meaning you
>intend?

I will add to pc's answer by noting that since Lojban has optional
tense, the untensed "lo speni" is not incorrect because she eventually
did become your wife.  You can be clear as to whether or not she was
your wife THEN, but you must be explicit to doso.

>Why can't selbri be the first word in a bridi?  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.

pc mentioned that this is what we call an observative.  The nature of an
observative is that for some reason you wish to call particular
attention to the relationship.  Pragmatically, that occurs most often
when the speaker directly observes an important relationship.  So long
as you accept that this focus on the relationship will take place, there
is no reason why a bridi cannot begin with the selbri.

>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?

Not sure if any of these have been coined as lujvo yet, and they might
not all be related as they are in English.

>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?

Most of the gismu are defined so as to be very general rather than
specific, on the assumption that people who need specific words will
turn to (or invent) lujvo for them.

>Does Lojban have separate words for the metric prefixes for base two and
>base ten numbers?  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?

I would think that lujvo of the family skamykilto (samki'o), skamymegdo
(samymegdo), would handle the binary pseudometrics.

>Is there any information anywhere about letter frequency in Lojban?

In the teach subdirectory of the ftp archive, there is
scrabble.unf(.gz?), which has an attempt at estimating letter
frequencies.  These days, it would be best to process all the existing
Lojban text for actual frequencies, but this hasn't been done.

>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.  Also, of course, another issue is the
>fact that Dvorak placed the letters h, q, and w in (relatively) easy to
>reach places on the keyboard, and Lojban does not use these letters at
>all.

I suspect however that Dvorak still is better than qwerty because it
puts the vowels in the easiest to reach places, and Lojban is quite
vowel rich.  The most common consonants are n,r,l, and s, I think, and
these are also probably treated better by Dvorak than by qwerty.

----
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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