[lojban-beginners] Re: double letters

[Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>]

On Tuesday 17 July 2007 10:09, Jorge Llambías wrote:
> The problem I have with that is that it opens the door to really
> weird words like {blaaaaaaaa} which I don't think anyone can
> really distinguish from {blaaaaaa}. We can say that those words
> will be excluded by common sense, and no special rule is
> necessary to block them, but even if everybody agrees in that
> particular case, perhaps not everyone will have the same common
> sense about {blaaaa}, or {blaaa}, or {blaa}. I prefer a restrictive rule
> that is occasionally inadvertently broken than an overly permissive
> one.

Words with arbitrarily long or repetitive vowel or consonant sequences could 
be useful as ideophones or onomatopoeias. For instance, {tctcitci} could 
mean "it rattles". There's also a place in Tahiti called Faaa. It's actually 
Faa'a, but the apostrophe stands for a glottal stop, which cannot occur 
inside a Lojban word, so it would have to be {faaas} or the like.

Pierre