R.M. Uittenbogaard" <reneuit@SCI.KUN.NL> wrote:
>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.
The tanru would be pronounced MLI-toi-NAN-du, whereas the lujvo is pronounced
mli-toi-NAN-du. It is of course important to not put secondary stress
on "mli" in the lujvo, relative to "toi".
>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.
It is a perfectly acceptable dialect in the language to use just the full gismu
and 4-letter+y rafsi, to make all lujvo. These words are called the "fully-
expanded" form and this techniques is used in much conversation for making
nonce lujvo, since few of us know more than a minimal number of short rafsi.
>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.
This is of course true. But as a Lojban user, you can come close to your
proposal by using only expanded forms.
>But I still think this is a minor unelegant point about Lojban, which
>I would have dealt with differently.
I understand. However, throughout the history of the project, there has
been a fear that excessively long lujvo would be so unaesthetically pleasing
to people actually using the language (as opposed to those talking about using
it) that some sort of haphazard abbreviation or shortening would take place
if a planned approach were not allowed for. The basis for this is a rather
strong interpretation of Zipf's Law, which observes that word length is
inversely proportional to frequency of use, when measured statistically across
a language. The consistency of Zipf's Law in many languages suggests that a
language that is not designed to be consistent with Zipf's Law will change
and evolve towards something consistent with the law. Therefore, good design
in to make sure that Zipf's Law is satisfied before we start, insofar as is
possible.
In any event, we have found that aesthetics of language, and elegance in
general, have been among the most controversial issues in constructed
langauge design, and that the features of one's native and familiar
languages tend to influence what they value in the language.
lojbab
----
lojbab lojbab@access.digex.net
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: ftp.access.digex.net /pub/access/lojbab
or see Lojban WWW Server: href="http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban/";