All Lojban words beginning with a vowel are supposed to have "." prepended, however, they are not /required/ in text as long as the word boundaries are clearly defined.
It is assumed that in such cases the reader knows that the pause normally indicated by "." is implicitly there, so in practice, many jbopre don't write it, either because of aesthetics, laziness, or possibly other reasons.
For example, {coi djeims mi e do klama lo vecnu} is the same as {coi.djeims. mi .e do klama lo vecnu}.
Personally, I feel that omitting /any/
"." is a bad practice that is potentially confusing, especially to newbies, so I endeavor not to do so.
to pu benji di'u fo lo mi me la.android. fonxa toi
mu'o mi'e.aionys.
On Apr 21, 2011 2:42 PM, "Johan Pretorius" <pretoriusjf@gmail.com> wrote:--
Hi Alan
I thought I would have a quick look before going to bed... and it seems that the troublesome word forms you mention are mostly (99%) cmavo that don't start with a consonant.
When writing vlastezba, I tried to adhere as strictly as possible to the word forms specified in the CLL, in section 4.2: In there, all cmavo that start with a vowel should have a dot pre-pended. So the forms, as I understand them, are as follows, where any two adjacent vowels may or may not have a ' inserted between them:
.V
.y.
CV
.VV
CVV
Cy
CVVV (experimental use only)
The only dot I could find in cmavo.txt was in "na.a", which seems like a mistake to me. Anyway, I took cmavo.txt, prepended dots to all lines starting with a vowel, ran it again - this time vlastezba choked on "ybu". I remember now that I hadn't defined y as either a consonant or a vowel, because the CLL was clear that it is NOT a vowel, but it wasn't at all clear that it was a consonant. Indeed, if "ybu" is a valid cmavo, that would seem to imply that "y" is a vowel, yet I clearly recall reading a list of vowels that excluded "y", with the explanation that it isn't really a vowel.
So I removed the "ybu" line from the file, and this time it parsed okay (see attached cmavo_dots.stdout). Do you mind running the attached cmavo_dots.txt through jbogenturfa'i to see if we get fewer than 80 discrepancies this time (I would do it myself, but I don't have a copy of jbogenturfa'i or, for that matter, a copy of Linux)
So I have three questions:
1) Is "y" a vowel or a consonant?
2) Are dots before vowel-only cmavo required or not?
3) If the dots are required, am I being reasonable to expect them to be present?
-Johan--
On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 2:35 PM, .alyn.post. <alyn.post@lodockikumazvati.org> wrote:
>
> vlastezba...
Johan PretoriusCell: 0829268327
pretoriusjf@gmail.com
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Group...