Message-Id: <m0tCfEr-0000ZTC@xiron.pc.helsinki.fi>
Date:         Mon, 6 Nov 1995 18:23:42 -0800
Reply-To:     Dylan Thurston <dpt@math.berkeley.edu>
Sender:       Lojban list <LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET>
From:         Dylan Thurston <dpt@MATH.BERKELEY.EDU>
Subject:      Re: Good Clarifying Question
To:           Veijo Vilva <veion@XIRON.PC.HELSINKI.FI>
In-Reply-To:  <199511061550.KAA09493@abel.math.harvard.edu>
Content-Length: 2846
Lines: 62

First some minor comments:

On Mon, 6 Nov 1995, Mark L. Vines wrote:

> ..
> Meanwhile, the stream (or string) keeps flowing.  As soon as you hit a
> word boundary -- judging this by stress in speech (or by spacing in text)
> -- you can disambiguate. ...

Actually, it's sooner.  Every brivla must have a double consonant cluster
early on (what's the exact statement?), while these are forbidden in cmavo.

...
> The most important of these complicating factors is the process of
> learning Lojban.  Homophone affix ambiguity makes that process more
> difficult, primarily because of one glaring inconsistency:  some rafsi
> have the same meanings as their identical twin cmavo, whereas other rafsi
> do not.

Well, I suppose the official answer is that you're not supposed to learn
rafsi until fairly late in the game, instead learning lujvo as units.
I'm not sure if any lujvo have come into common enough usage for that to
hold, though.  (Other than some obvious ones, like brivla.)  (Have you
found this to be a problem learning the language for yourself?)

...  This
> guarantees that any lujvo containing one or more of the 295 ambiguous
> rafsi will be resistant to comprehension by the learner.

But only when the ambiguous rafsi occurs at the beginning of the word,
right?  I think these sound ugly anyway--I don't like the glue.  People
seem to avoid them.

I don't understand some of your other points but...

...If someone prefers to omit the y'y or y'y.bu
> from their orthography whenever possible, then you must also hesitate
> between CVV & CV'V forms...

I think you'll find that with just a little practice, this habit of
certain writers becomes much less annoying.  The cases where y'y needs to
be inserted are really rather easy to recognize.  (And in any case, it's
hardly a fault of the language design, is it?  Would the new system be
better, or is it just that you'd have one less layer of hesitation?)


I'm not going to critique your proposal at the moment; that's already been
done more ably by others.  But, as lojbab said, you should realize there's
really no chance the rafsi system will be changed at this point.  However,
I don't think the exercise is pointless.  If you want to learn about
language design, for instance, it could be quite useful; or maybe you
just want to understand the rationale behind certain decisions.
Questions of the form "why wasn't it done this way" are, I believe, worth
answering.  (I should know--they helped me rather recently.)  But you can
probably raise the same technical points and fewer hackles by phrasing
your questions a little differently.

Oh, I just thought of one criticism of your proposal.   rafsi of the form
CVV or CV'V are, I believe, most aesthetically pleasing at the end of
words; but cmavo in lujvo compounds rarely (never?) occur at the end.

co'o mi'e dilyn.