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From: "Newton, Philip" <Philip.Newton@gedas-onsite.de>
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Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: three-letter gismu?
Date: Wed, 7 Sep 2005 13:32:33 +0200 
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Michael van der Gulik wrote:

> After looking through the Lojbanic dictionary, I'm pretty 
> certain that a lot of words can be trimmed. E.g:
> 
> mamta -> nimrir
> patfu -> naurir
> verba -> selrir
> 
> Infact, I can't believe there are gismu for some of the 
> words. I would, for example (running finger down page)
> never had made "vinji"-airplane. 
> Wouldn't varma'e be better? It is only one letter longer
> and saves people needing to learn that extra gismu.

This argument has been brought up a lot before :)

The gismu list is not intended to be a minimal list of semantic primitives,
but merely to "blanket" semantic space, with some overlaps, partly for
convenience.

mu'o mi'e .filip.