Message-Id: <9203100744.AA28228@relay1.UU.NET>
Date:         Tue, 10 Mar 1992 02:23:52 -0500
Reply-To: Logical Language Group <cbmvax!uunet!grebyn.com!lojbab>
Sender: Lojban list <cbmvax!uunet!pucc.princeton.edu!LOJBAN>
From: Logical Language Group <cbmvax!uunet!grebyn.com!lojbab>
Subject:      response to Frank Schulz on morphology
To: John Cowan <cowan@snark.thyrsus.com>
Status: RO

Frank Schulz writes:
<ivan writes:
<    mivmunje  .i la'edi'u krinu lo slabu tcaci belei preblgaria  .i cala
<
<I look up all the words.  I may not understand the words but I can at
<least figure out the word type.  "preblgaria" stops me cold.  Vowel
<ending, consonant cluster, must be brivla.  I look up "pre" giving
<prenu.  "ria" is not a rafsi.  Wait.  This must be bulgarian person.  A
<le'avla.
<
<This is all just wild guessing.  I did not use the morphology rules
<which I do not understand in any case.  Does anyone understand the rules
<well enough to actually use them?

Yes.  _You do_, for one.  The rules exist only as necessary to do the
job.  You, a novice who has repeatedly said you didn't know or
understand the words, figured out not only what word type it was, but
with the basic word lists, even what the word meant.  Can you do this
for an arbitrary word in pretty much any other language?

Basically, you will know a word is a name if it ends in a consonant; it
is a cmavo or compound if there is no consonant cluster (or no such
cluster broken only by a "y" hyphen, which doesn't count in recognizing
clusters).  It is a gismu if it is 5 letters long and has a legit
cluster (If you don't find it on your gismu list, you should suspect
that it is a typo, and look for contextually likely corrections in the
list).  It is a lujvo if it is at least 6 letters long, has a cluster
(possibly including 'CyC'), and can be broken into rafsi (which are all
of certain very specific forms.  Anything else is a le'avla.  At this
point, most le'avla will have a classifier rafsi on the beginning, but
this is a suggested convention and not a rule.

For someone reading Lojban, that is all you need.  To write Lojban, SUCH
THAT you are making up new lujvo and le'avla that aren't in a word list,
you need to better understand the rest of the rules.  Since the draft
textbook lessons do not take you to that point, you can consider
learning those rules an 'advanced topic' - it will be so in the
rewritten textbook.

The people who are writing the longer texts, and those who are
conversing here in DC, all seem to understand the more complex rules,
though we make errors at times.

lojbab