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on 4/21/02 7:25 AM, And Rosta at a-rosta@hidden.email wrote: >> 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. > Quite so. So the question is, how to define function-word shape so as to effectuate this. If we have CV(V), we have at least 13x9 (assuming minimal allowance for vowel pairs), or 117. At the same time, we lose the use of CV(V) predicates, which can be very handy for high-frequency morphemes. If we go with PV(V), [P for plosive} we have only 6x9, or 54, and we have to make an exception to the rule for Cai or something to enable letter names. Or, finally, we could go with PV(V)(V), which would increase it considerably, depending on what vowel-triplets were allowed. Still we'd have the letter-name exception, though. -- >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/