From @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Fri May 21 06:28:33 1993 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Fri, 21 May 1993 10:29:36 -0400 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 7817; Fri, 21 May 93 10:28:51 EDT Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 5346; Fri, 21 May 93 10:29:57 EDT Date: Fri, 21 May 1993 10:28:33 EDT Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Re: Cowan on morphology X-To: conlang@diku.dk X-Cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch Status: O X-Status: Message-ID: And's logic escapes me. If meaning is not predictable, then self-segregating morphology has no value at all??? And it ADDS complexity to the language and the task of acquiring vocabulary. Based on what it replaced - the old Loglan system of cramming words together in whatever way seemed useful, the Lojban system is immensely better AND easier both for learning vocabulary, AND for inventing new vocabulary on the fly - aprocess that will occupy Lojbanists for many years while the vocabulary remains much smaller than that of English. Having the self-segregating morphology means that you need to memorize the morphological roots that are unique, but as I have argued often before, this is not that onerous a task since the optional root values are from a limited set of forms derivable from the gismu, and you can always use the expanded form that is unambiguously associated with the gismu for any listener (THE thing to do when you are writing or speaking to an audience that may not knwo the rafsi well enough to dissassemble your creation, or deducethe meaning from context). However, with that morphology you have significant clues as to meaning, and moreover, because of the self-segregating quality, you know that a large body of meaniungs is excluded. i.e if the final morphological term is a rafsi for klama (come/go), you know beyond all doubt, that the word relates to going/coming of some type, and not to being blue, beating your wife, or compiling a computer program. It is possible that when you go to make a word, that you may 'invent' a word that already exists, and use it with a somewhat variant meaning - but it won't be dramatically variant, and your approximation is one that you can presumably correct when someone points out that you are a little off. Since my observation (heightened by seeing how my kids learn English) is that language learning is an evolving of successively closer approximations to a norm, Lojban supports easy language learning of this sort. lojbab