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Mike S., On 18/10/2012 02:23:
On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 4:59 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email <mailto:and.rosta@hidden.email>> wrote:
For my part I find it premature to discuss particular words, for two reasons. One is that it's too details-focused; better to add the meanings to a list of potentially-useful candidate meanings for words, for when the lexicon is eventually created. The other reason is that we seem to be drifting into an unagreed phonology merely by inertia; and assigning phonological forms to words merely entrenches the Lojbanoid phonology Jorge produced in his first sketch.
But doesn't the list that I am gradually compiling amount to exactly
that, i.e. a list of potentially useful candidate meanings for words?
I am not committed to the existence of the words that I am listing,
much less to their phonological forms.
Yes. I just mean that I will have nothing to say about them for the time being, for the reason I gave.
I recognize that you take a different view. You'd rather get up and building speakable Xorban asap, and don't want to get bogged down in a paralysis of endless discussion and decisionlessness. It may be that you may have to press ahead without carrying me with you.
(Me, I would like full discussion and explicit decisionfulness.)
--And.
I just believe that there are too many uncertainties and unknowns to
get everything decided properly through pure theoretical discussion.
So, yes, I do think that we need to explore an experimental
prototype.
Okay, prototyping is fine. But things like your initial h- convention are pointless in the light of that. Everything should have an initial h- by that convention.It would also help to use conventions where stems and particles are indicated by glosses in square brackets rather than by their temporary phonological forms. That would make exx easier to understand, and wouldn't let us be distracted by phonological forms that will be scrapped and will spare us from inadvertently learning forms that we might later be reluctant to discard because we've already learnt them. In sum, use as far as possible a graphical nonphonological notation.
--And.