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on 4/15/02 10:31 AM, Rob Speer at rob@hidden.email wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 15, 2002 at 06:49:13AM -0600, Rex May - Baloo wrote:
>> Let's be systematic about this. Let's say we want to reLoglanize Ceqli.
>> Loglan people, how many structure words will we need, assuming we go with
>> the Loglan/Lojban decision about what is and is not a structure word? Come
>> to think of it, do Loglan and Lojban agree on this?
>
> Lojban has 595 cmavo ("little words"). You can consider these structure
> words, but really a cmavo is any word that is not a predicate.
That's what made me want to make numbers, for example, predicates. OTOH,
they don't behave like predicates. Or do they?
Another bright idea I just had is to have a set of possible endings for
names that are _not_ possible beginnings for words of any kind. Say we
prohibit TS at the beginning of a word. Then TS would signal the ending of
a name. Probably a bad idea because of pronunciation difficulties, tho.
Does Lojban handle names the same way Loglan does?
>
> This is more than Loglan had.
>
> Right now I'm experimenting with rearranging the Lojban cmavo
> to fit a Ceqli-ish format. The form I'm using is C(C)V(V) - one or two
> consonants (but not weaks) and one or two vowels.
Looking forward to your conclusion there. Would it work as well to make it
CV(V), with one CV reserved for making the following morpheme into a cmavo?
For very rarely used cmavo, that is.
One thing I'd really like to end up with is a system where the definition of
cmavo allows for predicates of the CV form, like xi and ga. Sometime very
short predicates would be nice. I was thinking that maybe making the cmavo
definition PV(V), where P is a plosive or an affricate, might do the trick.
That makes for 8 P's
>
> (In a concession to Lojban I'm not counting y and w as weaks, nor h as a
> consonant, and putting back ' to separate vowels that don't form a
> diphthong. I tried it the other way, using y or w in between, but with
> so many words coming out like "coyo" and "kiwe" it got too heavy on the
> vowels.)
I could live with ' as a vowel separator, tho ideally we'd do it with some
kind of semivowels. I'd have to agree with Zamenhof, tho, as he
(apparently) thought Y and W unaesthetic. And, for that matter, JCB must
not have liked their looks, either. I hate the way 'kaw' looks as opposed
to 'kau'. Would you then have kau and ka'u as contrasting forms?
And then what do we do with Y and W?
Also, could do it your way AND allow CVyV and CVwV, with y never adjacent to
an i and w never adjacent to a u. That would give us a few more possible
words, and if we mainly have CV'V, they wouldn't be so hard to take.
--
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> Rex F. May (Baloo)
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