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Subject: RE: [lojban] The Knights who forgot to say "ni!"
Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2001 00:51:27 +0100
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From: "And Rosta" <a.rosta@dtn.ntl.com>
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Xod:
> On Wed, 29 Aug 2001, Jorge Llambias wrote:
> > I never use {jei} because I find {du'u xukau} perfectly
> > satisfactory.
> 
> If they are equivalent (I'd like to see somebody argue that they are not!)
> why not use jei as it's shorter?

One reason would be that {xu kau} rightly reflects that semantically the
bridi patterns with other Q-kau bridi, so there's greater form--meaning
isomorphism.

Still, I'd prefer {jei} to mean {xu kau} rather than {jetnu zei gradu}.

Even more, though, I'd like jei & ni to die, so that after the baseline 
thaw they could be reused for high frequency longwinded things. -- Lojbab
often invokes the deity Zipf in saying that frequency will shorten
the long, but there exists no mechanism in Lojban for doing so! I'm
hoping, though, that a movement to reassign little-used cmavo, or to
rework the morphology to make available new short cmavo will get
underway eventually.

--And.