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on 4/15/02 3:20 PM, Rob Speer at rob@hidden.email wrote: > On Mon, Apr 15, 2002 at 08:18:05PM -0000, uaxuctum wrote: >> I find it more "unpleasant" to use the >> apostrophe as a letter and much more to have it >> pronounced as an h--not to mention the overabundance >> of that sound in Lojban, which is by far the most >> constantly-to-be-pronounced sound in it; I can't >> stand having to say "aha", "eeha", "ohoo", >> "ehee" at every minute. > > This seems to be a ubiquitous problem. If you want a consistent way of > creating 'cmavo', you'll have to come up with some sort of method of > tacking on another syllable. (I've seen guaspi, with its > all-one-syllable words like "zglai". It's horrid.) With an apostrophe > you're saying "aha", "iha", etc. all the time, but with y/w you're > saying "aya" and "iwe" just as much. What if you steal one of the weaks > from the ordinary words, say "l"? Then you're simply using "l" far too > much. If you pick a word to transform the next phoneme into a cmavo, > say "za", then you're saying "za" too much. > > It seems the idea with the Lojban ' is that it should be unobtrusive in > both appearance and sound. I didn't realize the ' was intended to be a sort of 'h' sound. Is it in contrast with a stronger h in Lojban? If we allow cmavo to have the shape PV(V), regarding V as including vowels and semivowels, however represented, we have the six P's ? b, p, d, t, g, k, multiplied times the number of possible V(V)'s a, e, i, o, u, y --- 36 CV's j before each --- 36 CjV's and w 36 CwV's then aw,, aj, ej, oj 24 CV(semivowel) and the possible vowel pairs: ae, ai, ao, au, ea, ei, eo, eu, ia, ie, io, iu oa, oe, oi, ou, ua, ue, ui, uo 60 CVV's That adds up to 192. Lojban has 595. Hm. Is 192 enough? How many of those 595 are high-frequency? If only, say 190 of them are, the rest can be handled with a CV that makes the following pred into a cmavo, which could work like the Loglan system of deriving cmavo from preda thus: bea < BlEkA. Instead of thot, it would work thus. Caw look at. Zycaw For example. Zy being the CV that makes the following pred into a cmavo. Naturally, the overwhelming majority of these would be formed from single-syllable preds, yielding a 2-syllable cmavo. > > That said, given the chance to rearrange the cmavo I would like to make > too-common CV'V words into single syllables wherever possible. For > example, turning the ubiquitous Lojban "la'e di'u" into, say, "ke jdi". I'm with you on this, except I fear that allowing CCV(V) as a cmavo shape is seriously restricting the predicate space, at least for the terse, frequently-used preds I'd like to see, for making short compounds. -- >PLEASE NOTE MY NEW E-MAIL ADDRESS: rmay@hidden.email > Rex F. May (Baloo) > Daily cartoon at: http://www.cnsnews.com/cartoon/baloo.asp > Buy my book at: http://www.kiva.net/~jonabook/gdummy.htm > Language site at: http://www.geocities.com/ceqli/Uploadexp.htm >Discuss my auxiliary language at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/txeqli/