Notes on Notes

Please wrap all lojban words in your notes with {}. This wil provide nice hyperlinks for the other users. For example, "See also {barda}, {cmavo}.".

A Brief Note About Adding Natural Language Word "Definitions"

jbovlaste does not actually allow you to add definitions to natural language words. There are the meaning restrictions, or senses, of natural language words, but that doesn't really count. This is a lojban dictionary, after all.

If you have a natural language word that you feel like you'd like to add, in general, what you do is add a lojban word that then has a gloss word or place keywords that "point" to it.

For example, if you wanted to make a definition for the word 'door' in the sense of "covering for a doorway", you'd enter a definition for "vrogai" with "door;covering for a doorway" as the gloss.

Lujvo Definitions

Basic Lujvo Places

Lujvo places that match up should be entered using an equal sign. All places should be inside the $...$ delimiter. For example, taking the following entry from NORALUJV:

ba'urdu'u:bacru+dunku:to bitch/whine about something:$dunku1 $=bacru1 $dunku2 $bacru2

The definition should look something like:

$d_1=b_1$ bitches/whines/expresses anguish about $d_1$ with utterance/sound(s) $b_2$

Ambiguous Lujvo Places

If dealing with a lujvo that has components that start with the same letter, expand the abbreviation as far as you need to. For example:

$bi_3=ba_2$

Reordered Lujvo Places

In some cases, particularily in languages other than English, the places may not be ordered in the definition in the way the lujvo orders them, i.e. the lujvo place 1 may be the second place presented in the definition itelf, to make the definition flow well.

The general solution is to do the following:

$x_1=a_3=b_2$

This need only be used when the places are out of order, but if any place is out of order all places should be so marked.

In the case where one of the lujvo components starts with x, put more than one letter after the lujvo term, just to be extra clear:

$x_1=xi_3=xa_2$

In geekspeak, if a place numbering field has more than n pairs, seperated by equal signs, where n is the number of components of the lujvo, the first one indicates the actual lujvo place being discussed.

Definition Special Formatting

Short Version

In the definition "x1 is broda", please write "$x_1$ is broda". In the amazingly unlikely event that your word has more than 9 places, x10 and up need to be written "$x_{10}$". Note that jbovlaste doesn't really support place keywords beyond 9.

You don't need to do anything else special to mark up your definitions, but if you don't do the above things will look really bad in the final output and need a lot of extra work.

Please do be careful that your definition doesn't contain any extraneous dollar signs, by the way.

Long Version

The printed dictionary will be in LaTeX, so the definitions need to be LaTeX marked up. The definitions can have absolutely arbitrary LaTeX in them, but only when it sees stuff in $...$ sets will the HTML output attempt to display something useful.

The html output will turn all things like $x_1$ and similar into x₁. If there are still at least 2 dollar signs left, it's run through latex2html to produce pretty output. THIS IS VERY SLOW. Please try not to use it.

How To Write Definitions: A Walk-Through Example

Here's a walk through for adding an English definition for the lujvo "samru'e".

Go to http://jbovlaste.lojban.org/dict/listing.html and enter the word in the provided box.

Click the button, read the instructions, click the button, go to the record.

Select a language from the New Definition drop down box, click 'Go'.

In the Definition box, enter:

We're using $p_1$ rather than $x_1$ to identify which word of the lujvo the place comes from. See Chapter 12 of the RefGram. The dollar signs are explained below.

In the Notes box I entered "Taken from NORALUJV.TXT", because it was. You don't really need to put anything in the Notes box in general.

In general, there should be at least one keyword for the word as a whole (the gloss word), and a keyword for each place, one per line in the place keywords box. If the meaning of a particular natlang word is constrained (i.e. "bear in the sense of carry"), you put the meaning after a semicolon, i.e. "bear;carry". Not putting in such a constraint, or "sense" of the word, implies that there could never be any reasonable confusion about what that word means. See the help file on natural language words for more information.

IMPORTANT: The sense of a word must be in the same language as the word itself. See the help file on natural language words for more information.

Note that I'm hoping to obviate the need for all the semicolon malkalci before version 1.0.

So, in the gloss word box, enter:

computer program
computer process
program;computer program
process;computer process

This might be overkill, but people will vote as to which lojban valsi should be used for the English word 'process', for example, so don't worry much about entering too many words.

In the place keywords box, enter:

computer process
computer process inputs
computer process outputs
computer process stages
processing computer

IMPORTANT: The process (ha-ha) of defining natlang words requires hitting 'back' in your browser a lot. Some browsers remember only a limited number of pages in their history, so you might end up having to re-enter all the data you just entered. Make sure you can easily do so.

Hit submit. You will be asked to deal with a bunch of natlang words. Click on the first one. You shouldn't have to enter anything here because any specialized meaning or sense of the word you wanted should have been entered after a semi-colon when you made the definition.

IMPORTANT: The sense of a word must be in the same language as the word itself. See the help file on natural language words for more information.

Hit Submit a bunch of times until you come to a page like this:

Here we go...

No errors? Excellent.

Go to the page for the word you added.

Do NOT click on that link. Hit the Back button in your browser until you get to the list of natlang words to be added again. Do the next one. Keep going until they're all done.

In some cases, for example the new definition of process above, you may find yourself at a page like this:

Here we go...

This word is already defined with a default meaning.

The problem here is that the existence of a default meaning implies that no differentiation from that meaning is reasonable. Therefore, in order to add a new entry with another meaning you need to have an admin modify the existing entry.

Please send an e-mail to the admins.

Alternatively, if you are the person who entered the other definition, you can go edit it yourself to narrow the meaning.

We were unable to add the new word.

This means that someone defined the word you're trying to add without narrowing the definition at all. This is BAD, and whoever did it is a bad person, although it's possible this happened due to automated uploads of the gismu and cmavo lists (as was true in this case: the gloss word 'process' already exists from the automated upload of 'pruce).

Regardless, you have two choices: remove that word from your list, or submit a bug.

I would very much prefer the latter.

In this case, being the admin, I disambiguated the automatically entered "process" with the sense "regulated series of steps", and then went back to entering natlang words.

When all the words are entered, go back to the definition entry page (which hopefuly your browser stored for you) and hit 'Submit'. You should see a page like:

I'm sure you'll be glad to know that we identified all of the natural language words you provided. Hopefully you didn't make any typos! Here we go...

If you're seeing this, it probably worked. Please return to where you were and check on things.

Follow the link. Check that everything is correct, fix as necessary.

Please vote for your definition!

Then follow the links to all the natlang words and vote for them too.

Otherwise they won't show up in the dictionary at all! They also won't show up in the Best Guesses listings. Note that the process that updates the Best Guesses runs about once every half hour.

Note: you cannot vote for natural language words until the definition is fully entered (i.e. all the above process is complete), so don't try to go voting for them in the middle somewhere.