From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Tue Sep 06 01:55:23 2005 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Tue, 06 Sep 2005 01:55:24 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.52) id 1ECZEg-00010M-RL for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Tue, 06 Sep 2005 01:55:22 -0700 Received: from mxsrv2.tranzpeer.net ([202.180.66.215]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtps (TLS-1.0:DHE_RSA_3DES_EDE_CBC_SHA:24) (Exim 4.52) id 1ECZEb-00010C-Kz for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Tue, 06 Sep 2005 01:55:22 -0700 Received: from [203.184.13.197] (helo=gulik.co.nz) by mxsrv2.tranzpeer.net with ESMTP (Exim 4.34) id 1ECZEV-00064Y-J1 for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Tue, 06 Sep 2005 20:55:12 +1200 Message-ID: <431D5994.8070009@gulik.co.nz> Date: Tue, 06 Sep 2005 20:55:48 +1200 From: Michael van der Gulik User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040216 Debian/1.6.x.1-10 X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Lojban list Subject: [lojban-beginners] three-letter gismu? Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed X-Spam-Score: -2.6 (--) X-archive-position: 1976 X-Approved-By: mikevdg@gulik.co.nz X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-original-sender: mikevdg@gulik.co.nz Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-list: lojban-beginners coi rodo. This is an idea I had. I'm not proposing anything nor am I going to run off and design my own language quite yet :-). One of the weak points of lojban in my eyes is that there are 5-letter gismu, 4 and 3-letter rafsi based on those gismu, and then 2 or 3-letter cmavo. Many of the cmavo are the same as some of the rafsi, and you need to learn not only all the gismu but also their rafsi versions. It's quite an irregular system. Was there ever a proposal to have a plain, regular 3-letter system for everything - gismu, rafsi and cmavo? There should be enough words - take naïvely for example only CVC combinations (consonent-vowel-consonent) - assuming we use, say, 20 consonents and 5 vowels, we could form a vocabulary of 20*5*20 = 2000 words. This compares well to lojban's 1400 or so gismu and however many cmavo. This way, you could have exactly the same words for gismu and rafsi, and sentences would always be written in 3-letter blocks. Michael.