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Rex: > on 4/21/02 11:04 AM, And Rosta at a-rosta@hidden.email wrote: > > I'd say that associating part of speech with a particular CV pattern > > is too restrictive. For the very short and high frequency words, there > > need be no patterning of form and function at all, as these are basic > > words to be learnt right at the outset. For longer and lower frequency > > words, some patterning of form and function could be useful, but it > > could involve particular Cs and particular Vs, rather than tying up > > whole CV templates. > > On the other hand, one of the things that drew me to Loglan was that very > restriction. I like the 3-way divison of predicates, names, and the > structure words. You're saying that we maybe could have a more complicated > set of rules for this? I'm saying two things. Firstly, that 3-way division is spurious; it does not reflect any underlying reality of the language. Secondly, the form--function restrictions have adverse effects, in that common predicates can't receive really short forms, while very obscure structure words do receive very short forms. What I think is better is something like the way, say, that English question words begin with wh-. Not all words beginning wh- are question words, but it helps maintain a certain overall orderliness that a form-function pattern unites the question words. I've attempted that with the Plosive thing. Could > you give an example of how this might work? If we go with CV, we only have > around 14x6, or 84 pivor, and one of them could be a converter of predicates > to pivor. Would around 80 pivor be enough to cover all the high-frequency > pivor we'd need? If we allowed the diphthongs as well, it would be > considerably more. > > I guess the question is, how many high-frequency pivor do we need? I'm resistant to the very notion of pivor as a single class. There is no clear boundary between 'structure' and 'content' words, and both sorts fall into distinct subtypes with distinct semantic and grammatical characteristics. I think you'd be better off building your vocab from the bottom up and then assigning appropriate forms later on, once you see what patterns are emerging in the vocab. --And.