long tanru

This page was renamed from Some since that was a really bad name.

Have I said yet that I suspect that "true" Lojban style ojbanic style might include extremely long tanru? Perhaps it is malglico, or in any case non-lobykai ojbanic, to desire small words with poignancy. Perhaps the spirit of Lojban is to achieve such shades of meaning not by relying on a huge, historical, subtle vocabulary, but by constructing detailed nuanced tanru on the spot. By "true" of course I mean trying to go where the internal logic

and flow of the language takes us, rather than trying to aim it in a

pre-declared direction. The existence and beauty of ke and bo hint and

encourage us to take tanru in a direction that English doesn't want to.

A tendency in this direction would address the Great Dictionary Problem,

and give us some Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis W effects by providing us with a new, rather poetic, dynamic skill. In English we pause for a moment and try to recall the One Right Word, whereas perhaps in Lojban we should pause for a moment and

construct a monstrous tanru with kes and bos. Unstacking ke and bo might

be an easier skill then de-lujvo-izing, recalling rafsi, and figuring out

the place structure of an unfamiliar lujvo.

Whatever the case may be, since this is a very un-Englishistic habit, I

think I will try to develop it!

Did I write the above? And why is this page titled "some"? --xod (Yes: but I think it would be better not to associate positions with individuals--though this is happening on the Wiki, alas-- so that their IDEAS could be evaluated without the sometimes personal acrimony incurred on le jboste...)

.ienai. The anonymity of Wiki drives me bats. Avoidance of personal connotations (and thus acrimony) is one thing, but it's exasperating not to have some kind of identity linking these ideas together, so one can tell if the person who said X here is the same as the one who said Y there... and also just to be able to see how the give-and-take is going in a given discussion! We can't even tell how many people there are, whether two supporting views are from the same person or different ones, etc. (And I also don't know why this page is called "Some") --mi'e .mark.

• It's called some because someone (I thought it was michael (go'i), but it could have been la xod) on another page created by means of "some people say that" (not verbatim). IOW, just poor Wiki-Building Technique from a beginner. And Rosta

I have always been lukewarm to lujvo but prefer tanru (or neither, sometimes, going for the Gismu Deep Structure eep Gismu Structure). Tanru-heavy sounds good to me! --mi'e .mark. -- But I must qualify that, I think: long tanru I like, but not very long tanru at the expense of sumti! tanru are ambiguous, and using them to avoid the pain of actually working out where the sumti are supposed to go is sparing yourself at the cost of paining your listener. I'm talking about sentences that are one huge observative tanru.

I don't mind claiming responsibility for this paragraph. I haven't found myself using stupendously long tanru though, I think they have been of reasonable length. --xod

I agree with the paragraph--for what it's worth, coming from a "newbie".

But as was mentioned, on Wiki "ko'a goi le se jinvi cu zifre sepli le jinvi pe ko'a", which helps focus the work/play on the material.

--mi'e cein.