[lojban-beginners] Re: bu denpa

[Michael Turniansky <mturniansky@gmail.com>]

2009/6/1 Jorge LlambÃas <jjllambias@gmail.com>:
> On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 2:38 PM, tijlan <jbotijlan@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Why "denpa bu" instead of "bu denpa", which to me would make more
>> sense, to the extent that it would be consistent with "zo denpa"?
>
> The "names" of consonants are by, cy, dy,..., zy. The natural names
> for vowels (.a, .e, .i, .o, .u) were already taken by the time lerfu
> were defined (Lojban being "the logical language", the logical
> connectives were more or less the first words to be defined, and the
> shortest possible words were immediately grabbed.) So, the vowels
> became .abu, .ebu, .ibu, .obu, .ubu so that they begin with the same
> letter they name, like the consonants, and then the -bu suffix was
> generalized to apply to any word. (I don't swear this is exactly how
> it happened, but it's probably close.)
>

  In 1975 Loglan, there were a set of 8 suffixes to correspond to each
combination of {capital/lowercase} {Latin/Greek} {consonant/vowel}.
Thus, sai was capital "S", sei was lowercase "s", sao was capital
sigma, seo was lowercase sigma.  The Latin uppercase suffix was -ma,
and so forth.  bu is probably holdover/remnant from that system.
             --gejyspa