HeliodoR wrote:
la maikyl. pu ciska di'e
a'u.i'e (can't think of a better way to say "cool!")
Was there ever a proposal to have a plain, regular 3-letter system for everything - gismu, rafsi and cmavo?Not a bad idea. Though it [has] some problematic points... Having different forms for words - according to length and letter order - is a useful toolto give the listener/reader a hint what kind of word that might be.
True. You would lose this. uu
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?
"English" probably derives from the word "Angle", as in the Anglo-Saxons, one of the tribes that settled England and who probably would have spoken "Anglish" if there is such a word. English is a terrible language; I feel guilty writing in it. It's a terrible shame that it became the de-facto international language.
Oh, and the "however many cmavo" are more than a thousand, so the consonant-vowel-consonantcombo is not usable anyway. (.uinai)
After looking through the Lojbanic dictionary, I'm pretty certain that a lot of words can be trimmed. E.g:
mamta -> nimrir patfu -> naurir verba -> selrirInfact, I can't believe there are gismu for some of the words. I would, for example (running finger down page) never had made "vinji"-airplane. Wouldn't varma'e be better? It is only one letter longer and saves people needing to learn that extra gismu.
BTW, xorxes: Vorlin looked interesting... until I discovered that the inventer created a whole new charactor ("crossed n") that doesn't even exist in the unicode character set. o'onairu'e
Michael.