lan= guage was designed for that--it still is, despite some retrofits.

But it doesn't work. At least it doesn't i= f your predicate words are

all [CCV/CVC]CV in form= and you have no good way to borrow. (Loglan

was= originally supposed to be an experimental language, remember, not

necessarily a full-fledged everyday language.) So soon gro= da madzo

("big make"/enlarge) became groma, clika = rando sonma madzo ("similar

end sound make"/rhyme)= became cliransonma, and so on--without any real

d= erivational system.

Now, this was= n't entirely a bad thing, because there was no system for

= figuring out the structure of these new predicates either, and if a=

predicate's structure is incomplete, you begin ge= nerating nonsense

sentences the moment you do much= with negation or quantification.

Lojbanists ignor= e this problem for some reason, though it's fairly

obvious, with the result that Lojban is pretty much designed to

produce gibberish for at least some predicates.

Anyway--to simplify derivation, the Great Mor= phological Revision

modified permissible predicate= shapes and introduced

"djifoa"--abbreviated "affi= xes" for at least the more productive

roots. You c= an't predict which roots will have djifoa, nor what their

= form will be, but once you memorize the djifoa, formal derivation i= s

fairly automatic.

<= div>This is clearly an awkward solution--a retrofit to fix a fatal = design

flaw. What still astonishes me is that when= the Lojbanists left

Loglan, they faithfully copie= d both flaw and retrofit. I would've

redesigned th= e system completely to eliminate the problem from the

beginning, but when I mentioned this to various Lojbanists, including

LeChevalier, their leader, they all replied that th= e djifoa system was

ingenious and worth preserving= --they even took credit for it.

I= 've considered releasing a total reboot of Loglan without the

<= div>morphological and derivational bugs, but I think languages base= d on

logical predicates are inherently unnatural. = Human languages are based

on linguistic predicates= , which are in turn based on an overarching

web of= relationships (case, etc.), not on mere place structure. One of

my personal oddities as a Loglanist was that I actually memo= rized the

place structures of predicates; most Log= lanists (and Lojbanists, I

think) just memorized t= he basic meanings. But there's a difference

betwee= n

madzo =3D make

and

mad= zo =3D X makes Y from/out of Z.

C= ompare this with

brudi =3D X is a= brother of Y through parents Z.

= From a linguistic standpoint, the relationships differ sharply; as

logical predicates, however, their structures are identica= l. Loglan

mitigated this with a system of case tag= s, which the Lojbanists

rejected. My Loglan 2.0 wo= uld be based on such a case system.