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--- In ceqli@yahoogroups.com, MorphemeAddict@w... wrote: > In a message dated 8/10/2005 10:52:29 AM Eastern Standard Time, rmay@m... > writes: > > > > and Lojban word formation is more regular. > > > > Interesting. How is it more regular? > > > > > > Loglan primitives could be chopped up, so to speak, and recombined to make > compounds that were also five letters long, and thus indistinguishable from > primitives. > Lojban gismu (primitives) usually have short forms, known as rafsi, and > shaped CVV, CV'V, CCV, or CVC, where the apostrophe ( ' ) in CV'V is pronounced > (usually) as an English 'h'. There are also long rafsi for every gismu, which is > just the gismu with the final vowel replaced by 'y', pronounced as a schwa. > The rafsi must be combined such that they are vowel-final, with an internal > consonant cluster near the beginning, else a hyphen-consonant, usually 'r', is > inserted to form the cluster. (If the given consonant is already an 'r', then > the hyphen is 'n'.) > > Rafsi, and the rules for combining them, are complex and controversial. But > they are also unambiguous, which is an improvement over Loglan compounds. > Thanks! Actually, Loglan had gone part of that way before. I still think they had their CVCCV/CCVCV compounds that were indistinguishable but had gone further with those dad-blame allomorphs to make compounds that were clearly compounds. That was actually what led to my break with Loglan. The allomorphs just seemed horribly inelegant. So I suggested the morphology change which is the same a Ceqli's right now -- a bundle of cuaba followed by a bundle of faloba, with the two defined much as they are now. This would have enabled monosyllabic predicates, and, therefore, compact metaphors _without_ resorting to allomorphs, which still give me the shivers. I abandoned the little word/predicate distinction for other reasons, but I'd still like to see a Loglan formed based on the Ceqli morphology, or something quite like it. True, the new rules necessitated two things: First, the "sa" to keep preds from forming metaphors (it was originally "se" in my proposal), which, if you try looking at a few random sentences, you'll see would actually be rarely needed, and, second a lessening in the supply of little words, as lmnr would be off-limits for beginning a morpheme. But that would still have left quite a bit of CVV space, I believe, and CVVV's could have been admitted as little words with little loss to make up that difference. Just for fun, here's an attempt to use that morphology to redo the caption from my cartoon on the Loglan website at http://loglan.org/Texts/UorfCartoon.html Phrase by Phrase Translation Gandias Braon, Teacher Brown GURUS BRAUNS, (Converting the end-consonant to an end-s) ba na hijra, something is here BA DO HIRSTA e djadou mi and informs (knowledge-give) me of KAI JANFA GO lepo ba danza the-event-of his desire of TOPO BA VOL lepo pruduo the-event-of testing (test-act) TOPO TRAIKAR le la Uorf, bliklimao. the Whorf (Worf) Hypothesis (possible-clear- make). TO VORFS SA FEIKLARFA. Free Translation Professor Brown, someone is here who wants the proof of the Whorf Hypothesis. Hm. One syllable less than the original (assuming all the Loglan diphthongs are, in fact, diphthongs. And NO allomorphs. Needless to say, I'd love to see that experiment made. I'd make it, but I'm way too busy. BTW, Jim Carter used the same cuaba/faloba system in his Guaspi, at: http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc/guaspi/acmpaper.html