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Rex: > on 4/29/02 9:25 PM, And Rosta at a-rosta@hidden.email wrote: > > > True. I think that feature of Ceqli is not a good one; it gets in the > > way of saying "Man bites dog" efficiently. So I'd prefer a different > > strategy for compounding, such as having a 'hyphen word' (like Lojban > > zei) or inserting a homorganic nasal before an initial strong (so > > da + da becomes danda) or suchlike. > > JCB and others reacted to my original proposal with horror, saying that 'sa' > was unZipfean or something. And if I understand Zipfeanism at all, I'm > sure that having a compound longer than its constituent parts would be > unZipfean. You correctly understand what the loglanists mean. My answer is this. Firstly, a compound's meaning is more than (i.e. more specific than) the sum of its parts, so it is fittingly iconic that the presence of this extra bit of meaning be signalled by this extra bit of sound. Secondly, the loglanist claim is simply rubbish: the zipfean principle is that length be proportional to frequency. But the purpose of compounding is to create a new word for a new meaning; it has nothing to do with frequency. Furthermore, it could be argued that the interests of zipfeanism would be better served by not having a rule that compounds adjacent predicate words, since other things being equal it is quite likely that the frequency of adjacent uncompounded predicate words would exceed the frequency of compounds. Finally, if a compound really is longer than its high frequency warrants, the only solution is to replace the compound by a shorter form. > I've considered making 'sa' optional, and counting on spaces and juncture to > distinguish to blufawl from to blu fawl. My initian impetus, of course, > was to get away from those horrible Loglan allomorphs. I don't think optional sa would work. Instead, change its function to a hyphenator. Then contrast blu fawl with compound 'blu sa fawl', or add new rules for forming short compounds, e.g. f > w: bluwawl. --And.