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On 8/9/05, Rex May <rmay@hidden.email> wrote: > I continue to agonize over names. I first encountered the concept of names as a distinct > grammatical category in Loglan, and I was intrigued by it. I think that in one way or > another this concept is pretty essential to language. Now, I've considered the Loglan > system, which, essentially, requires that all names end in consonants, which makes them > distinct from all other words. However, if we're going to have self-segregating > morphology, this entails requiring that names always be followed by a pause, so that the > consonant won't seem to be part of the following word. This makes for a large variety of > possible names, and for terse ones, for that matter, but the pause rule gives me pause. I think the mandatory pauses around foreign words (and in a few other contexts, if I remember right) are one of the most annoying features of Lojban, which is otherwise pretty cool. > I've thought of calling for a glottal stop instead of a pause, but then it would have to have > a letter, or some kind of a rule that a blank space after a cuaba (the Ceqli version of the > 'end in a consonant' rule would of course be 'end in a cuaba) calls for that glottal stop. We > could then have some monosyllabic names, which would be nice: > janzo duel ci dom > jans (or whatever) duel ci dom > > But I think that's beginning to look non-Ceqli. I don't think it's a good idea to add a phoneme to an IAL that is used for one narrow purpose like this -- especially the glottal stop, which (when not surrounded by vowels on each side) can be hard for some people to pronounce. > Anyhow, to summarize, here's the way I see Ceqli names at this point: > > The name root is followed by -zo in all cases: janzo, jansonzo, xikagozo, etc. > And in order to specify what sort of thing is named, the whole thing can be sa'ed or hu'ed: This is good. I think you should stick with it. I have more name suffixes in gjax-zym-byn, but just one is probably right for an IAL. -- Jim Henry http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/review/log.htm