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[lojban-beginners] Re: compasss directions
Has there ever been any discussion of changing the gismu for the cardinal directions to make them less confusing? Just for larffs, I did some checking and found that {disko} for "east" (with rafsi "-dis-") and {vupra} for "west" (with rafsi "-vup-" and "-vu'a-") would work. These are assembled from the corresponding sounds from source languages found in http://www.lojban.org/jbo/publications/etymology/finprims.html -- except for the "v", which actually comes from "vu'a", where I assume it was intended as an alternate approximation of the w in "west".
mi'e .sen.
Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu> wrote: On Friday 16 March 2007 14:43, Turniansky, Michael wrote:
> I'm sure this has been discussed before, but is there any reason why
> the spatial tenses for north, east, south, and west bear no
> resemblance to
the gismu for the same? (With the possible exception of
> be'a/berti).
The gismu for directions were made, like most gismu, by mashing together words
from six languages with a computer program. Three of them came up with the
same first letter. (The 's' of {snanu} is from the initial of
English "south", the initial 'st' of {stuna} and {stici} is from the end of
the English words, and the initial 'b' of {berti} is from Chinese "bei".)
Furthermore, two of the short rafsi begin with 's'. To avoid confusion in
abbreviations for directions, the cmavo were chosen to begin with four
different letters. See
http://jbovlaste.lojban.org/wiki/boxing%20the%20compass .
phma
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