Message-Id: <m0t1i5m-0000ZWC@xiron.pc.helsinki.fi>
Date:         Sat, 7 Oct 1995 15:34:25 -0700
Reply-To:     MarkLVines@EWORLD.COM
Sender:       Lojban list <LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET>
From:         "Mark L. Vines" <MarkLVines@EWORLD.COM>
Subject:      lo lerfu me'e zo y'y a zo y'y.bu
To:           Veijo Vilva <veion@XIRON.PC.HELSINKI.FI>
Content-Length: 6027
Lines: 122

i fi la and fa mi pu cusku di'e
> > iji'a za'a loi jbonunsku cu'u piji'i le jboxelymri na'e vasru le
> > denpa bu  iku'i po'o xu? do na'e pilno lo lerfu me'e zo y'y

i la and spuda mi di'e
> ja'a go'i i ku'i la mark culsn sarji lo da'i nu le lerfu
> pohu zoi gy h gy ckaji la'e zoi gy "alloglyph"/"allograph" gy

iji'a ja'o la and cu pilno lo lerfu me'e zo y'y.bu ijo ra ka'enai rivbi
tu'a pilno

i la paulos bau le glico cu dafycpe di'e
> I have been seeing words like "lehavla" instead of "le'avla" and
> "giuste" instead of "gi'uste" in this list. Initially I thought
> this was due to keyboard limitations, but some articles mix the
> forms of writing. Is it optional to use the apostrophe, or to
> replace it by "h"?

i la za'e djan.kau'an cu spuda fi di'e
> The apostrophe is standard and preferred.  Some people like to
> use an "h" instead, and this is a semi-standard variant.  And
> Rosta likes to omit it altogether, using an "h" when ambiguity
> would result: he writes "ba'a" as "baa", "ba'i" as "bahi".
>
> Naturally, one sometimes seems mixed text, because some articles
> contain text from different sources.

i la and te pinka di'e
> The proposal to make {h} a standard allograph (or "alloglyph",
> in Mark Shoulson's terminology) of {'} received quite a lost
> of support when it was made, but did not become official.
>
> I also follow the practise of omitting {h/'} when it is redundant.

Seems to me that, if you are using {h} as an alloglyph for {'}, then you
should try to use {h} in about the same places & with about the same
frequency as other Lojbanists use {'}.

iji'a la and te pinka di'e
> The motivation is partly aesthetic, and partly practical. The
> {'} is typographically ugly when preponderant. [Some critical]
> software doesn't recognize it as a within-word character.
> Omitting it altogether makes the text briefer and more pleasing
> to the eye.

i la lojbab spuda la and di'e
> >I< happen to like having a language that looks unlike English
> - it helps remind me to  avoid malglico usages.  But that wasn't
> much a factor when we made the decision - the goal was to have a
> consonantal sound that was not a consonant for morphology
> purposes, and making it look different from a regular alphabetic
> character seemed like an excellent way to go about it.

The {'} apostrophe is under one of the (normally) weakest fingers on the
QWERTY keyboard.  In cursive writing it either breaks the inkstream or
must be added in retrospect.  The {h} does not suffer from these
drawbacks.  I sympathize with those who prefer {h}, but I would prefer
that the y'y lerfu, whatever its alloglyph, not be omitted altogether.

i la lojbab pu cusku di'e sera'a la and
> > He has been criticized for this, although his practices ARE
> > fairly close to the alternate orthography. Of course it also
> > means that his Lojban usages often get ignored (all our
> > automated tools will not recognize his texts as being Lojban,
> > so he can't use the parser, or get his usages processed into
> > the dictionary).

i la and cu spuda la lojbab di'e
> That is always the fate of one who does not go with the majority.
> The civil rights of the orthographically deviant are withheld;
> their usages are shunned.

We can always rely on that old plan-linguistic auto-parsical
post-Labovian victimship farce for a chuckle, iepei?

In general, morphological redundancy in language can often be justified
as a factor that offsets some difficulty.  Keeping the y'y or y'y.bu even
when it seems redundant can be justified because its presence helps to
mitigate what we might call the rafsi-cmavo anomaly.

I admire the rafsi principle, which is elegantly & beautifully expressed
in Lojban.  However, the rafsi method of contracting & combining word
roots is not (nor, apparently, was it intended to be) automatically
intuitive for English speakers.  It has to be learned.  But the learning
process is made more difficult by the rafsi-cmavo anomaly.

Lojban has 1545 rafsi, of which (by my current estimate) about 392 are
phonologically identical to their "twins" among the 1085 cmavo.  In many
cases, the rafsi-twin & the cmavo-twin are both derived from the same
gismu.  In at least that many cases, the twins have similar meanings.
These instances of shared gismu-paternity & similar meanings are helpful
in getting the knack of gismu-to-rafsi contraction.

Unfortunately, out of the 392 rafsi which have phonologically identical
twin cmavo, about 295 (by my current estimate) are apparently unrelated
in both meaning and derivation.  For example, fe'i is the rafsi for
female but the cmavo for divided by; ti'u is the rafsi for daughter but
the cmavo for a time stamp.  Such "false twins" create a (fairly slight)
language learning difficulty.  Who knows what other effects they may have.

Seems convenient to term the source of these effects the rafsi-cmavo
anomaly.  In practice, the anomaly involves nothing more serious than
hesitating between two different meanings for a single phonological form.
 But what happens when the lerfu y'y or y'y.bu is omitted from the
orthography?  Our hesitation over many forms must then cover four
possible meanings, of which two may (if we're lucky) be rejected (after
due consideration) as non-Lojbanic.  Two units of hesitation have become
four.

Dropping the redundant y'y or y'y.bu therefore squares the difficulty of
navigating thru the rafsi-cmavo anomaly.  That's one reason why I, as a
learner, would request that this lerfu not be dropped.

I'm tempted to suggest another possible "false twins" effect.  I gather
that a comparable anomaly exists in Arabic, where dissimilar concepts
sometimes appear to share the same tri-consonantal word root.  Under the
influence of the Qur'an, whose chapters are headed by mysterious isolated
consonants, & of the Abjad cipher, the Arabic root anomaly has become a
perennial subject for mystical speculation in Islam.  Should we expect a
similar metaphysics to develop around the rafsi-cmavo anomaly in Lojban?

co'o mie mark,l