[lojban-beginners] Re: Preliminary chapter 1 for Lojban learners

[Michael Turniansky <mturniansky@gmail.com>]

2009/3/18 Jorge LlambÃas <jjllambias@gmail.com>:
> On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 2:59 PM, Michael Turniansky

> There is also the case of rafsi, which can sometimes have stress,
> sometimes not, and sometimes have stress in different syllables when
> they have more than one, always remaining the same rafsi. So stress
> does not change the meaning of a rafsi, it only changes to adjust to
> brivla form rules.
>

  That's a red herring, since rafsi are NOT words, only part of words,
and therefore their stresses are deterministic.

> So stress in Lojban is generally used to determine word form, but not
> to distinguish two otherwise identical words. It's not clear why
> cmevla should be the exception to this.

  There are only two categories of words whose stresses are allowed to
vary:  cmavo, where the meaning explicitly doesn't vary with the
stress, and cmevla, whose status we are arguing, and whose
non-penultimate stressing must be marked, according to the refgram.
So it's chimerical at best which of two cases is an "exception" to the
other.  Since, as I've already demonstrated, stress alone can change
the meaning of a phoneme stream, I contend that the cmavo is the
"exception".  And since this whole discussion started with place
names, la berLIN is in Germany, while la BERlin is in Vermont.  Can
the same place names have different pronunciations by different
people?  Sure, and not just in stress, vowel sounds, and other more
major changes, too.  That's why cmene has an x3 place.  zo legorn pu
cmene la livornos lo brito.  So do "la legorn" and "la livornos" refer
to the same place?  Yes.  Are they the same cmevla?  No.  So just
because PORtugal and portuGAL may happen to have the same referent
doesn't mean they are the same cmevla, nor that the necessarily do
have the same meaning (see BERlin/berLIN above).

                                     --gejyspa