At 05:48 PM 12/4/02 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
For some reason not known to me, Lojban adopted an extra constraint
with
the rafsi: no more than one CVV, one CCV, and one CVC. Loglan allows
up to 3 rafsi, but there can be more than one of a given form.
For example, felda (Lojban farlu) has rafsi fel, fed, fea.
Lojbab, do you remember why this changed?
It made the assignment job easier, as well as the job of learning the
rafsi: if you know there can only be one CVC, then if you know one,
then
there are no more. This was (I thought, and whoever I consulted
agreed)
better at addressing arguments that the rafsi system was difficult to
learn. The cost is the occasional hyphen that might be required by
one CVC
that could have been eliminated by having a second one. Given that we
could not eliminate more than a small fraction of such hyphens (I
think it
was under 5% and probably more like 1% of the set of hypothetical lujvo
used for tuning), easier learning took precedence.
We decided long ago that learning rafsi by themselves was not
particularly useful.