History: cow oak

Source of version: 4 (current)

From [http://www.lojban.org/lists/lojban-list/msg09535.html]:

~pp~
    * To: lojban-list@lojban.org
    * Subject: The case of the cow oak: a lexicographical anecdote
    * From: Arnt Richard Johansen <axx@xxx.xxx>
    * Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2005 12:35:31 +0100 (CET)
    * Sender: nobody <nobody@digitalkingdom.org>

On Jbovlaste, we (that is, Robin :) ) have imported the contents of 
luj1999.ZIP into these pages:

http://jbovlaste.lojban.org/wiki/noralujv%20entries%20with%20no%20definitions?lang=en

This word list has, I believe, been assembled programmatically by Nora 
based on occurrences in the corpus.

Now, many of these words are nonce, typos, or simply erroneous 
registrations of natlang words. But one thing that caught my eye in the 
first few pages of that list was:

    {bakcindu} bovine+oak

It *could* simply be an error, I thought, but there are many species of 
oak. Maybe one of these species is the "bovine" one in some language the 
original author wanted to calque from, possibly Linnean binomials. I 
searched for "bakcindu" in the lojban.org search interface (which covers, 
among other things, this mailing list since the dawn of time). But no 
occurrences were found. I pored over the List of Quercus species on 
Wikipedia, but nothing seemed remotely cow-like there.

I then asked Pierre Abbat, our resident taxonomist, to help out. A few 
minutes after receiving a response that there was no such thing as cow 
oak, I started racking my brain about how it could come to be that that 
word had ended up in the list. Did Nora have access to some texts back in 
1999 that wasn't searchable on lojban.org yet? Probably not. So it *had* 
to be in there somewhere.

Then it hit me. Obviously, Nora's script did canonicalization of the lujvo 
forms. Otherwise, there would be at least some alternative forms in the 
list. So it was probably registered from a non-canonical form. I tried 
searching for "baknycindu", and BINGO!:

    http://balance.wiw.org/~jkominek/lojban/9602/msg00128.html

That was, apparently, the only usage ever of that word. And in a really 
bizarre metalinguistic discussion, too (read it!).

I feel a bit bad about going to Pierre before thinking through *why* there 
was no hits on the search form now.

-- 
Arnt Richard Johansen                                http://arj.nvg.org/
SÃ¥ mange ord som mulig per gram var utvelgelsesgrunnlaget da bÃ¸kene
skulle plukkes ut.                    --Erling Kagge: Alene til Sydpolen
~/pp~

And now I discover that there actually __is__ a cow oak. See [http://wordnet.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn2.0?stage=1&word=cow%20oak|Wordnet].
History: cow oak

Source of version: 4 (current)

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