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I don't believe that "ya", with a semivowel, should be contrasted with "ia", or anything of the sort. "ia" should be pronounceable either way, so that simple words like "bia" can be pronounced as one syllable, while more difficult ones like "xfia" can be pronounced comfortably as two. Depending on how the orthography ends up, this may end up being spelled as "bya", but the option to pronounce it as two syllables should still be available. I realize that I was one of the people to argue for semivowels spelled as y and w, before. But I'm beginning to think that r, l, m, n, and q will do just fine for weaks, without y and w. If y is not available for schwa, and as long as it will have an unconventional symbol anyway, I suggest a hyphen. How many two-letter predicates are there currently? I can't see how much harm it would do to add one more letter to them; say, gunpe -> gunper, and pivor -> pinvor. Or heck, invent a new word for the concept of these smallish non-predicates, a single morpheme like "pinor", just like Lojban turned the compound "cmavla" into the entirely new word "cmavo". Something a bit different: How far will re-Loglanizing Ceqli go? Will it adopt the grammar? (I hope so, as it doesn't have much of its own.) This would require giving place structures to all the predicates; would it use the same ones as Lojban and just respell the words? I think there's room for improvement in the place structures. Too many Lojban predicates have irrelevant places tacked onto the end. The classic example is botpi, "x1 is a bottle containing x2, of material x3, with lid x4". Only x1 and x2 are necessary, and even x2 sparks metaphysical debates about whether something which doesn't currently botpi anything is a botpi. So hopefully Ceqli could clean this up. Would it adopt Lojban orthography, with the addition of q and an ordinary h? The only changes this would require is to change x to c, and add the "Bach" sound as x. This sound really isn't that ugly once you start using it. I don't think the name of the language should be respelled yet again; why can't it be called "Sheng-lee" instead of "Cheng-lee"? But if x is that evil, leave it out. The alphabet will already be missing w. Lojban words for forming "tanru" (Lojban's name for combinations of predicates that would be done with "sa" in Ceqli) would have to act slightly differently. In some cases there is an explicit word that connects the predicates, such as "bo" (put between two words to link them with the highest priority) or "co" (reverse the direction of the link; "barda lunra" is the same as "lunra co barda" except for the place structure - each takes the places of the rightmost predicate). There's also "je", for "and", which is the most explicit way to link an 'adjective' to a 'noun', yet people always leave it out since the vague default connection works almost as well. Anyway, I'm thinking that these could replace "sa" where they appear. Then there would be no syllable penalty to use them, and perhaps people wouldn't be afraid to use them and thus say what they mean. But the odd thing about words like these in Lojban is that they have affixes. "bo" in a tanru becomes the affix -bor- in a compound word. Other cmavo have affixes too; "mi" (I, me) is -mib-, for example. But Ceqli has no affixes; the predicate _is_ the affix. So essentially, I believe that many pivor will need to have equivalents that are fake predicates, which would mean nothing alone but would be used in compound words. Perhaps these could be formed by adding q to the pivor. bo -> boq, go -> goq, etc. This would not be done to all pivor. "sa" would be a prime example of a pivor which would need no predicate version. (It would be a no-op.) Here ends this rant. I'll be back to my usual e-mail soon enough. -- Rob Speer _____________________________________________________________ Run a small business? Then you need professional email like you@hidden.email from Everyone.net http://www.everyone.net?tag