[lojban-beginners] Re: three-letter gismu?

["Newton, Philip" <Philip.Newton@gedas-onsite.de>]

Michael van der Gulik wrote:

> 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 -> selrir
> 
> Infact, 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.

This argument has been brought up a lot before :)

The gismu list is not intended to be a minimal list of semantic primitives,
but merely to "blanket" semantic space, with some overlaps, partly for
convenience.

mu'o mi'e .filip.