Re: lujvo-making

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>]

>> Because lujvo-space takes precedence over fu'ivla-space, this cannot
>> fall apart:  "cporba'u". would be a fu'ivla.
>
>So the rule is that "cporba'u" cannot be a fu'ivla, right?
>

Correct - that word is exactly of the "slinku'i" form for which the test
is named that rejects such words.

>I thought that the 'y' between consonants was always allowed, even
>between a pair within the same rafsi, because some people might have
>problems with some consonant clusters. Was this ever so, or did I just
>dream that up?

Never so.  This is the distinction between the hyphen which is generally a
schwa, and the buffer, which must be some other sound and hence is often
a higher lax vowel, like English short-i or IPA barred I (the Russian "61"
letter).  In my careful speech, I tend to make the hyphen a bit more back,
and the buffer a bit fronted.  The buffer is also a much shorter sound than
even the short hyphen-schwa.

>Have the rules for fu'ivla ever been worked out? I thought it was
>just "anything that's left" after all cmavo, gismu, lujvo and names have
>been removed, but that is not enough, because that would allow "cporba'u",
>which cannot be any kind of word.
>

The definition is close to what you suggest - it is anything that in a Lojban
speech-stream cannot be taken as a gismu/cmavo/lujvo/name.  cporba'u fails
because of the Slinkui test, which is that if you insert a CV cmavo in
front of it, the result in the speech stream is a lujvo "pa slinku'i" becomes
"pas-lin-ku'i".

There are several rules that are know that help identify illegal fu'ivla
but they are far from intuitve and there has neer been an effort to
devise a complete set of rules, which would of course be a set of strings
of CVCCVCVCVCVVC etc. that would break up.  Nora's morphology algorithm
implementation would do this, but even generating all the test cases of, say
12 characters or less, would probably exceed reasonable computation time,
unless there was a smart case generator/weeder (I know because I tried %^(  )

lojbab