[lojban-beginners] Re: Gismu confusion

[Matt Arnold <mattarn@123.net>]

coi cuncuxnas
To be  speakable, a language must have several thousand words. It would be impossible to design that many words without such correspondences, unless we invented a dozen new sounds and letters.
You may be interested in this Wiki page on a related topic: "gismu differing in one letter only".
http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Gismu+differing+in+one+letter+only
I would be interested if someone performed a similar study about gismu with switched letters.
-epkat

lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org wrote:
>coi rodo
>
>I'm just learning more Lojban vocabulary, thanks to Logflash. Hopefully with 
>more practice in translation efforts and just plain speaking/writing in 
>Lojban, I should get better quickly. Right now, though, I find myself 
>getting confused about which gismu means what in English. For an example, 
>that comic strip mentions {le grana} or "the rod/pole". I got {grana} mixed 
>up with {ganra}, however, and momentarily thought I had wandered into an 
>interestingly translated detective story, perhaps. But then, in trying to 
>figure out what "broad" was, since it obviously wasn't {grana}, I tried 
>{garna}, "rail". Now, I realize that loban (thankfully!) doesn't have any 
>homonyms or anything like that, but isn't it just as wonky to try to 
>navigate between words that are straight anagrams of one another? Perhaps 
>I'm just fumbling because my knowledge of vocabulary is as yet unrefined.
>
>mu'omi'e cuncuxnas.
>

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