lujvo morphology

["R.M. Uittenbogaard" <reneuit@SCI.KUN.NL>]

Hello,

It is only two months or so since I first read about Lojban on the net,
and I read it with great interest. I was amazed to see that it is possible
to create a language which is so unlike any natural language. But there
is one aspect to Lojban that I find far from elegant, and that aspect is
the lujvo morphology.

There are two major problems which can be encountered when creating lujvo:
first, unpermissible consonant clusters may arise (which can be prevented by
inserting an -y- hyphen), and second, care must be taken that the lujvo
does not fall apart (e.g. in a cmavo and another brivla).

Now it seems to me that, despite precautions, there are several lujvo which
will still fall apart: in one of the ckafybarja texts found on an ftp site,
the word "mlitoinandu" appears. I wondered how a Lojban-speaker would know
that this is intended to be one single lujvo: since the stressed syllable is
the penultimate one, I would expect this word to fall apart into
"mlitoi nandu" which is a tanru and so might have a distinct meaning from
the meaning intended.

Actually, I would find it a much better solution if all the vowel-final
rafsi were abandoned altogether. This can be done by eliminating all the
rafsi for gismu, and only assign CVC type rafsi, and only to cmavo. The
only rafsi which may be used for gismu are the gismu itself, and the
gismu with its final vowel deleted. Of course, this implies that more
-y- hyphens would become necessary, which make longer words. But I think
that would not be a great disadvantage: long words like "dormochambro"
and "konservoskatolo" are common in Esperanto.

The advantages of decreasing the number of rafsi would be several:
most importantly, Lojban-learners would not have to learn all the rafsi
which correspond to the gismu. The lujvo would become far easier to
recognize. Furthermore, no -r- or -n- hyphens are necessary because all
the rafsi end in a consonant, and the lujvo will never break apart
anymore; sometimes, however, an -y- hyphen is still needed. And the
formation of lujvo would become much easier.

Probably, the lujvo morphology rules are all settled and fixed at this
stage in development, and my opinion will not make much of a change.
But I still think this is a minor unelegant point about Lojban, which
I would have dealt with differently.

Greetings,

Rene Uittenbogaard