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on 4/20/02 8:01 PM, Rob Speer at rob@hidden.email wrote: > 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. This is a -very- Loglan/Lojban concept. To my ear, there's an enormous difference in sound between "byah" and "BEE-ah" I was surprised to learn recently that Logan had developed into a state where you could pronounce 'mekykiu' MEH-kuh-kyoo or meh-kuh-KEE-oo, which to me is absurd. I think the pronunciation should be as tight as esperanto, with vowels and semivowels clearly distinguished. > > 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". My whole thinking here is Zipfean. That words like 'come', tho predicates, shd be shorter than a lot of low-frequency pivor. > 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.) Not much, in the sense that Mandarin doesn't have much. Yes. A lot of the grammar. But I want you and others to point out any dopey aspects to Log/Loj grammar that shd be avoided. > > 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. I was just going to say pretty much the same thing that you've said here. That the place structures are run into the ground. I think a maximum of three would be a good rule of thumb. > > 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. No. One of my biggest problems with Loglan as it has developed is what I'd call a patchwork approach to phonology. The bouncing back and forth of i and u from vowel to semivowel is an example of that. Likewise the nearly unpronounceable sii and buu, stuff like that. Also they seem to have regular phonemes and exceptional ones like Q and X. > > 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. I've been thinking myself that 'sa' would tend to be used less than one might expect, because of such words as that. > > 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.) I was thinking of using -r, as Loglan does. Actually, they wd occasionally, I think be used as lone predicates. Thus: We come up with a pivor that acts as instrumental preposition, say 'pyu' Go ski pyu krayon. I write with a pencil. We add -r, and 'pyur' means 'to use'. I think a lot of things can be done back-asswards this way, making the case tag/prepsitions first, and deriving predicates from them. -- >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/