4.10 Considerations for making lujvo
- Every word beginning with a vowel must be preceded by a pause. Such words are either cmavo, fu'ivla, or cmene; all gismu and lujvo begin with consonants.
- Every cmene must be preceded by a pause, unless the immediately preceding word is one of the cmavo la, lai, la'i, or doi (which is why those strings are forbidden in cmene). However, the situation triggering this rule rarely occurs.
- If the last syllable of a word bears the stress, and a brivla follows, the two must be separated by a pause, to prevent confusion with the primary stress of the brivla. In this case, the first word must be either a cmavo or a cmene with unusual stress (which already ends with a pause, of course).
- A cmavo of the form “Cy” must be followed by a pause unless another “Cy”-form cmavo follows.
- When non-Lojban text is embedded in Lojban, it must be preceded and followed by pauses. (How to embed non-Lojban text is explained in Section 19.10 (p. 458).)
4.10 Considerations for making lujvo
Given a tanru which expresses an idea to be used frequently, it can be turned into a lujvo by following the lujvo-making algorithm which is given in Section 4.11 (p. 68).
In building a lujvo, the first step is to replace each gismu with a rafsi that uniquely represents that gismu. These rafsi are then attached together by fixed rules that allow the resulting compound to be recognized as a single word and to be analyzed in only one way.
There are three other complications; only one is serious.
The first is that there is usually more than one rafsi that can be used for each gismu. The one to be used is simply whichever one sounds or looks best to the speaker or writer. There are usually many valid combinations of possible rafsi. They all are equally valid, and all of them mean exactly the same thing. (The scoring algorithm given in Section 4.12 (p. 69) is used to choose the standard form of the lujvo – the version which would be entered into a dictionary.)
The second complication is the serious one. Remember that a tanru is ambiguous – it has several possible meanings. A lujvo, or at least one that would be put into the dictionary, has just a single meaning. Like a gismu, a lujvo is a predicate which encompasses one area of the semantic universe, with one set of places. Hopefully the meaning chosen is the most useful of the possible semantic spaces. A possible source of linguistic drift in Lojban is that as Lojbanic society evolves, the concept that seems the most useful one may change.
You must also be aware of the possibility of some prior meaning of a new lujvo, especially if you are writing for posterity. If a lujvo is invented which involves the same tanru as one that is in the dictionary, and is assigned a different meaning (or even just a different place structure), linguistic drift results. This isn't necessarily bad. Every natural language does it. But in communication, when you use a meaning different from the dictionary definition, someone else may use the dictionary and therefore misunderstand you. You can use the cmavo za'e (explained in Section 19.11 (p. 460)) before a newly coined lujvo to indicate that it may have a non-dictionary meaning.
The essential nature of human communication is that if the listener understands, then all is well. Let this be the ultimate guideline for choosing meanings and place structures for invented lujvo.
The third complication is also simple, but tends to scare new Lojbanists with its implications. It is based on Zipf's Law, which says that the length of words is inversely proportional to their usage. The shortest words are those which are used more; the longest ones are used less. Conversely, commonly used concepts will be tend to be abbreviated. In English, we have abbreviations and acronyms and jargon, all of which represent complex ideas that are used often by small groups of people, so they shortened them to convey more information more rapidly.
Therefore, given a complicated tanru with grouping markers, abstraction markers, and other cmavo in it to make it syntactically unambiguous, the psychological basis of Zipf's Law may compel the lujvo-maker to drop some of the cmavo to make a shorter (technically incorrect) tanru, and then use that tanru to make the lujvo.
