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Rex: > > On the whole I think it is preferable for word-length to reflect word > > frequency > > (i.e. to assign the shortest forms to be most often needed words) rather > > than reflect the distinction between 'content' words and 'function' words. > > My feelings exactly. I'm hoping to do both with the PV(V) idea. I think > Loglan really blundered when it made all preds 2 syllables, meaning that > either all compounds of two preds have to be unweildly 4 syllables, or that > they must have allomorphs, which of course they do. > > > I have done a quick run through the Lojban cmavo list to see which could > > be discarded or replaced by 'content' words. Discarding the fairly obvious > > stuff leaves a list of 210 items, which could be further pruned quite > > drastically. > > > > Here is the list of 210 items: > > Now, this is superb. Let's say we need all of these and no others. That > means there's 18 that aren't covered by PV(V), easily handled. On the other > hand, my 192 figure is based on 6 P's leaving out /dZ/ and /tS/. If we add > characters for those, and extend the P's to 8, we'll have 256 cmavo. But even if all these 210 cmavo were deemed worth preserving, some of them are so obscure as to not deserve to eat up precious short-word space. So not all function words should literally be little words. --And.