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on 4/21/02 9:43 AM, And Rosta at a-rosta@hidden.email wrote: > Rob: >> How far will re-Loglanizing Ceqli go? Will it adopt the grammar? (I >> hope so, as it doesn't have much of its own.) > > It is probably easier, for a collaborative enterprise conducted by > nonexperts, to take Lojban as a starting point. (I say Lojban rather > than Loglan because it is better documented & easier to learn about, > with more active practitioners.) Dissatisfaction with points of > Lojban grammar can then be formulated as revisions to Lojban grammar. Since I'm the only Loglan person participating, I think, I'll agree. > >> This would require giving place structures to all the predicates; > > This is more a property of language in general than Lojban in > particular. Yes. And Ceqli has always had place structures. I definitely don't want a lot of place structures. > >> 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. These linking things are new to me, I think. The Loglan system is that preds modify following preds. Le kukra prano. The fast runner. And to make compounds you have to bust the words up into cockeyed allomorphic 'combining forms', giving you something like 'kuapra' for a compound. I say 'something like' because you never know what the combining form is going to be without looking it up. The Ceqli system is that there are no combining forms. On the contrary, something like. To kala faul. Automatically forms a compound To kalafaul Unless the preds are separated with a 'sa'. To kala sa faul. This was my solution to the whole combining forms mess, and is fundamental to the difference between Ceqli and Loglan (and evidently lojban as well). In order to effectuate that situation, I had, obviously, to change the wordshape rules, else all compounds would be at least 4 syllables. I opted for redefining rlmnq as 'weaks,' or non-consonants, in order to be able to borrow more words from natlangs. And, while I was at it, I abandoned the idea of taking 2/3 of a Chinese word and 14% of Osco-Umbrian or whatever and pasting them together into a new root. A very cute idea, but pretty pointless in practice. >> >> 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. And now I'm not sure what Lojban things you're talking about here. I fully agree that in many cases you'd have pivor in between preds other than 'sa', and so could drop 'sa'. I'm thinking of tricky stuff that makes all those different pretty little girl's school things. >> >> 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.) > > Adopting anything like the Lojban rafsi system seems unnecessarily > complicated; it is rightly one of the most widely disliked features > of Lojban. > I presume rafsi are the same as the hideous Loglan allomorphic combining forms? If so, of course not. Ceqli's intitial impulse was to do away with those. All other changes pale in comparison. Now, I don't mind at all deriving predicates from structure words by adding -r (or maybe something else). That's an entirely different thing. A good, helpful thing. -- >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/