Re: [lojban-beginners] Complicated parallelism question

[Stela Selckiku <selckiku@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 6:42 PM, Luke Bergen <lukeabergen@gmail.com> wrote:
> Listen up nintadni because I STILL make this mistake regularly.  se te ve xe
> are the "swapping" cmavo.  The rafsi of these cmavo are sel ter vel xel
> respectively.  meanwhile tel is the rafsi for stela.  Do not think that if
> you say {teldunda} you are saying {te dunda}, you are in fact saying {stela
> zei dunda}.

As I seem to be one of the only people this makes sense to, I'll try
to justify it.  By far the most common conversions are se/sel and
te/ter.  Giving those different sounds helps keep them distinct.  It
gives a little variety to the (many many) lujvo with conversions in
them, so that all the lujvo aren't el-el-el-el-el.  On the other hand,
ve/vel and xe/xel are actually rather rare, since not all gismu have
an x4 or x5 and even when they do they have more obscure meanings.  So
making them fit a pattern makes them easier to memorize, but doesn't
make the language sound too homogeneous.  I'm not sure if that's the
original motivation for sel-ter-vel-xel, but that's how I've
rationalized it, anyway. :)

mi'e la stela selckiku mu'o

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