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On Mon, Apr 15, 2002 at 11:24:27AM -0600, Rex May - Baloo wrote:
> 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
It seems to me that that would yield far too few words.
> > (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?
The ' is pronounced as a short "h", and so (just like in Lojban) kau and
ka'u are contrasting. (This has never been as much of a problem as
contrasting "be" and "bei", but that just comes from people
mispronouncing "e".)
I'm using y for the schwa (as in Lojban). This allows the consonants to
be by, cy, dy, etc. Also, y is used to separate illegal consonant
clusters in Lojban, and it seems that some of them might still arise in
the Ceqli morphology when a weak at the end of one word falls next to a
consonant at the beginning of another. For example, 'kan tsa' would
sound exactly like 'kan sa', so if the 'nts' cluster arises it could by
a rule become 'kany tsa'.
w just ceases to exist.
> 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.
That could work, but the C(C)V(')(V) rule is already yielding more
possible words than there are cmavo in Lojban, so it's not necessary.
--
Rob Speer