Received: from VMS.DC.LSOFT.COM (vms.dc.lsoft.com [205.186.43.2]) by locke.ccil.org (8.6.9/8.6.10) with ESMTP id IAA03507 for ; Sun, 22 Oct 1995 08:18:43 -0400 Message-Id: <199510221218.IAA03507@locke.ccil.org> Received: from PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM (205.186.43.4) by VMS.DC.LSOFT.COM (LSMTP for OpenVMS v1.0a) with SMTP id 28FCD39B ; Sun, 22 Oct 1995 8:16:32 -0400 Date: Sun, 22 Oct 1995 12:10:30 +0000 Reply-To: ucleaar Sender: Lojban list From: ucleaar Subject: Re: NAI X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan Status: OR X-From-Space-Date: Sun Oct 22 08:18:46 1995 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU > Since NAI is a permissible standalone word in an utterance, it is > a mistake to consider it solely a suffix. What would a context be for an utterance containing only NAI? Is {du'u nai kei} grammatical? What does it mean? > It is of course a word because it meets the Lojban definition of a word. I don't know what that is. But at any rate, I meant "word" in the vague but general way it is understood in linguistics. > You would have a better claim that "ba'e" is a prefix and not a word, > and likewise "zo", since they CANNOT stand on their own grammatically. > i suspect there are sveral other selma'o that cannot stand on their > own either - is "ku" a suffix? is "le" a prefix? The inability to stand alone is not a sufficient condition for affixhood. English THE, for example, cannot stand alone, but this is merely because it requires a following common noun. But I do agree that a good case can be made for {zo}, and maybe {bae}, being prefixes. > IN short, I do not see what the point of your claim is - it sounds > like you wish to choose another definition of "word", one which > complicates the morphology and the grammar of the language. There isn't an agreed definition of "word" in linguistics (and it is my personal belief that grammar contains no entity with characteristics corresponding to the meaning of the English word _word_), but linguists would generally agree that a question like "does this utterance contain 20 words or 1?" has some empirical content and is worth debating. I am not advocating complication of Lojban morphology. I am tentatively claiming that it already is more complicated than had hitherto been thought. At minimum, a word must occupy its own node in syntactic structure, and I was suggesting that NAI doesn't, and is therefore not a word. I gave two reasons. The first is semantic: Lojban in general has no idioms - the sense of a phrase is fully predictable from the meaning of its parts, whereas the sense of a word is not fully predictable from the meaning of its parts. By this criterion, {nai} looks like a suffix. Second, and more interestingly, UI are in general invisible to other words, but they appear to be visible to NAI. How so? This is accounted for if the bond between UI and following NAI is morphological. > Just as wishing that we called the apostrophe (or h) a consonant > because it happens to be one in most of linguistics, but would make > the Lojban design less clear, is less than productive. I have always approved of what Lojban nowadays does in most cases where it had used technical terms nonstandardly: it uses Lojban. So we've dropped "lexeme" and use "selmao" instead, etc. etc. In this case a Lojbab term to replace "consonant" would be appropriate. But in my point about NAI I was not quibbling about terminology. --- And