History: lujvo

Source of version: 2 (current)

From the Lojban web site FAQ (http://www.lojban.org/files/brochures/faq.htm): __lujvo__: compound word lujvo are based on ((tanru)); they encode one conventionalised meaning of the semantically ambiguous tanru. tanru, in turn, are a sequence of ((brivla)). This gives the (much simplified!) grammar: *selbri :- brivla | tanru *tanru :- brivla brivla+ *brivla :- lujvo | gismu | fu'ivla | cmavo And (semantically) *lujvo :- tanru The use of ((cmavo)) as ((brivla)), it should be noted, is marginal, and involves primarily anaphora, rather than distinct semantic content words. This means that, underlyingly, all Lojban concepts are claimed to be expressable as a combination of ((gismu)) and ((fu'ivla)). (This leads to the ((Gismu Deep Structure)) hypothesis.) A lujvo is composed of a sequence of rafsi, concatenated according to a rather large set of morphological rules. Two strings of characters that are both a lujvo are considered the same word if and only if their rafsi belong to the same set of words in the right order. This means that mitpavycinglepre, mitpavycinletpre, mi'urpavycinglepre and mi'urpavycinletpre have no difference in meaning, and may alternate freely. However, it is only common to list the first alternative in dictionaries, because of the four, that's the one selected by the ((Tansky-Lechevalier scoring algorithm)). ''Of course. Anything we can't express with gismu and combinations thereof, we borrow as fu'ivla.'' If it can't be expressed as a fu'ivla from ANY language, it cannot be (or has not been) said by humans.