Message-ID: <431ECD79.8040003@gulik.co.nz>
Date: Wed, 07 Sep 2005 23:22:33 +1200
From: Michael van der Gulik <mikevdg@gulik.co.nz>
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To:  lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org
Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: three-letter gismu?
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HeliodoR wrote:

> la maikyl. pu ciska di'e

a'u.i'e (can't think of a better way to say "cool!")

>     Was there ever a proposal to have a plain, regular 3-letter system for
>     everything - gismu, rafsi and cmavo?
>
>  
> Not a bad idea. Though it [has] some problematic points...
> Having different forms for words - according to length and letter 
> order - is a useful tool
> to give the listener/reader a hint what kind of word that might be.

True. You would lose this. uu

> Imagine You don't know English and try to guess what 'teacher' means. 
> You look at the
> end of the expression and thus You can tell that it is something (most 
> likely a person) teaching.
> (Though English has awfully ugly exceptions like 'chamber' - a thing 
> that does 'chamb'? .oi.u'i)
> And that's a phenomenon I would call really widespread: the Hungarian 
> name of my people
> 'Hungarians' is "magyar" which comes from the very 
> Old-Old-Old-Hungarian "monyer" [monier
> written Lojbanicly] meaning "speaking man". BTW, could someone tell me 
> what "English" means?

"English" probably derives from the word "Angle", as in the 
Anglo-Saxons, one of the tribes that settled England and who probably 
would have spoken "Anglish" if there is such a word. English is a 
terrible language; I feel guilty writing in it. It's a terrible shame 
that it became the de-facto international language.

> Oh, and the "however many cmavo" are more than a thousand, so the 
> consonant-vowel-consonant
> combo is not usable anyway. (.uinai)

After looking through the Lojbanic dictionary, I'm pretty certain that a 
lot of words can be trimmed. E.g:

mamta -> nimrir
patfu -> naurir
verba -> selrir

Infact, I can't believe there are gismu for some of the words. I would, 
for example (running finger down page) never had made "vinji"-airplane. 
Wouldn't varma'e be better? It is only one letter longer and saves 
people needing to learn that extra gismu.

BTW, xorxes: Vorlin looked interesting... until I discovered that the 
inventer created a whole new charactor ("crossed n") that doesn't even 
exist in the unicode character set. o'onairu'e

Michael.