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Date: Wed, 27 May 2015 18:49:02 +0100
From: And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com>
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To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [lojban] {la .alis.} book
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Michael Everson, On 27/05/2015 18:00:
> On 27 May 2015, at 16:42, And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> Well, a glottal stop is a consonant, and a pause is a pause.
>>
>> And both phonetically realize phoneme /./.
>
> A pause of indeterminate length is a phoneme?

A pause of indeterminate length is phonetic realization of a phoneme.
 =20
>> But why would one expect consistency with regard to a grammatical featur=
e that is expressly variable?
>
> Because Lojban is hard enough and there are no native speakers?

Lojban's design is not at all optimized to make life easy for its learners =
or speakers. Its users could adopt conventions that eschew many elements of=
 its design, in order to make life easier for its users, but that requires =
a consensus in usage and entails a de facto repudiation of those many eleme=
nts eschewed.
 =20
>> A rough analogy from English is the omissibility of _that_ from the star=
t of complement clauses (e.g. "He knows (that) she is"): what lunatic would=
 'regularize' an English text by restoring every omitted _that_? And would =
you make overt *every* covert terminator?
>
> It seems to me that a relative pronoun is different from a state
> process.

That _that_ isn't a relative pronoun. I don't understand what a 'state proc=
ess' is. Like Lojban's terminators, clausal ('subordinating conjunction', '=
complementizer') _that_ is usually but not always omissible without affecti=
ng sentence meaning.

(With regard to the _that_ that introduces relative clauses, the case for a=
nalysing bare relatives as containing a null _that_ is more complicated and=
 hence perhaps weaker than the case for analysing bare complement clauses a=
s containing a null _that_.)

>If lu/li=E2=80=99u is regular, why shouldn=E2=80=99t sei/se=E2=80=99u be?

sei/se'u is regular; it just is regular according to rules less simple than=
 you would prefer.

--And.

--=20
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