[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
[lojban-beginners] Re: three-letter gismu?
la maikyl. pu ciska di'e
coi rodo.
This is an idea I had. I'm not proposing anything nor am I going to run
off and design my own language quite yet :-).
One of the weak points of lojban in my eyes is that there are 5-letter
gismu, 4 and 3-letter rafsi based on those gismu, and then 2 or 3-letter
cmavo. Many of the cmavo are the same as some of the rafsi, and you need
to learn not only all the gismu but also their rafsi versions. It's
quite an irregular system.
Was there ever a proposal to have a plain, regular 3-letter system for
everything - gismu, rafsi and cmavo? There should be enough words - take
naïvely for example only CVC combinations (consonent-vowel-consonent) -
assuming we use, say, 20 consonents and 5 vowels, we could form a
vocabulary of 20*5*20 = 2000 words. This compares well to lojban's 1400
or so gismu and however many cmavo.
This way, you could have exactly the same words for gismu and rafsi, and
sentences would always be written in 3-letter blocks.
Michael.
Not a bad idea. Though it some problematic points...
Having different forms for words - according to length and letter order - is a useful tool
to give the listener/reader a hint what kind of word that might be.
Imagine You don't know English and try to guess what 'teacher' means. You look at the
end of the _expression_ and thus You can tell that it is something (most likely a person) teaching.
(Though English has awfully ugly exceptions like 'chamber' - a thing that does 'chamb'? .oi.u'i)
And that's a phenomenon I would call really widespread: the Hungarian name of my people
'Hungarians' is "magyar" which comes from the very Old-Old-Old-Hungarian "monyer" [monier
written Lojbanicly] meaning "speaking man". BTW, could someone tell me what "English" means?
Oh, and the "however many cmavo" are more than a thousand, so the consonant-vowel-consonant
combo is not usable anyway. (.uinai)
mi'e .xili,odor.