From @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Sat May 22 10:47:09 1993 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Sat, 22 May 1993 14:48:59 -0400 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 2751; Sat, 22 May 93 14:48:14 EDT Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 3089; Sat, 22 May 93 14:49:25 EDT Date: Sat, 22 May 1993 14:47:09 EDT Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Re: Cowan on morphology X-To: ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK X-Cc: conlang@diku.dk, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch Status: O X-Status: Message-ID: <092-zBAsMCN.A.t7H.N00kLB@chain.digitalkingdom.org> I don't see how our morphology for compounds has anything to do with learnability of >gismu<. You can learn gismu without learning either rafsi or lujvo. I can't speak for Nick or Colin, but I suspect that most often, people arew writing without particular regard for their audience, or perhaps to write at an audience that they know will be using the word lists, or to write for their peers in the use of the language, who have a reasonable chance of knowing the rafsi in question. I agree that it would be nice to have more texts aimed at beginners, but people don't write such texts. My statement about use of rafsi applied to the experiences we have had here in LIVE conversation, both conversation sessions, and at LogFests. Very few lujvo, and the ones that are used are composed of rafsi that are well known (like 'sel-' for se conversion, etc.), and I myself use some expanded lujvo, when creating them on the fly - OR, if I get a blank look, I expand it immediately for the listener. I think the conversations on the IRC have also minimized lujvo. A lujvo based on klama in final position should have something to do with 'klama'ing. Now the language won't always be under prescriptive control, but while it is, I suspect that no 'sapphire' ending in 'klama' words will get into the dictionary. Indeed, at the moment within the community, there remains a very strong literalism trend that objected to the relatively lesser sloppiness of JCB, who used 'zmadu' (x makes why from z) for causals in a very malglico manner. The standard that we teach is that a lujvo should represent one specific meaning from among the possible meanings that the associated tanru would have, recognizing that some amount of tanru modification could take place to bring places fromt he modifier terms into the lujvo. The primary debate has actually been whether the determination of such place structures should be more or less algorithmic from the source tanru, which practice has NOT been accepted. But Nick's writings on lujvo making are promoting a standard only one step less drastic. Loglan pre-GMR was very much like what you suggest would be better - allowing jbama and klama to both be represented by -ama in a compound. It was not as you say - people had to memorize every word they wanted to use, and to rely on the dictionary for every little thing they did. The result was that there was far less Loglan text written than you see these days being posted to Lojban List. And people DIDN'T like it, and they complained. And one noted linguist (Zwicky) was especially critical of this. lojbab