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on 4/24/02 7:16 PM, And Rosta at a-rosta@hidden.email wrote: > > 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. Yes, that's a problem that irritates me. I like having pi and ga for small and large, ci and zo for female and male. > > 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. Well, Esperanto and many of its relative do all this with port-of-speech marking. One question: Do you see 'predicate' as a category that can be clearly defined? Another question: Would abandoning the tripartite classification wipe out any of the other important features of Log/Loj? > > > > 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. Well, me too. Numbers are a case in point. and other math terms, for that matter. Oh, yes. I like the idea of pifu, meaning 'right away', but pi is a predicate and fu is a pinvor. > > 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. That's actually sort of what I did to begin with. That's how pi and ga and all came to be. And now we're in the process of Loglanizing it. So are you saying that Ceqli could absorb some of the 'logicalness' of Log/Loz without separating predicates from everything else? One problem with from the bottom up is that I'm afraid of unconsciously following English patterns. -- >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/