Message-Id: <5.2.0.9.0.20030120000457.00ab2b60@pop.east.cox.net>
Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2003 00:09:38 -0500
To: lojban@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [lojban] By the way < tangent?
In-Reply-To: <D1E81D80-2C2E-11D7-B599-000393629ED4@uic.edu>
References: <200301192303.40563.phma@webjockey.net>
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From: Robert LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>
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At 10:22 PM 1/19/03 -0600, Steven Belknap wrote:
>consider the English word "tangentially"
>
>On Sunday, January 19, 2003, at 10:03  PM, Pierre Abbat wrote:
>
> > Chapter 13 lists the cmavo {ta'o} "by the way" as coming from {tanjo},
> > which
> > is the word for a trigonometric function (li pa tanjo lo julra'o be li
> > vomu).
> > What's the connection? Also, is {zu'u} derived from {zunle}?

The cmavo do sometimes come from malglico sound-alikes.  It was at the time 
a memory hook for the all-English speakers learning the language, with the 
malglicoism (the one Steven suggests was indeed what we had in mind) so 
obvious that I wasn't afraid that people would think that ta'o had to do 
with trig functions.  The alternative was pretty much random selection from 
a large set of available cmavo, and we tried to avoid randomness.  If a tie 
to zunle is not noted in the list, then there probably was no tie, and it 
was chosen either randomly or for contrast with some other word we had in mind.

lojbab

-- 
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                    703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:                 http://www.lojban.org