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Re: [lojban] Re: emotions

la djordan cusku di'e

> What is with this thought that gismu are somehow privledged brivla?

They are somehow privilidged. It is rather obvious that they are,
from the point of view of the morphology.

> This is the same thing that makes people assert that all cultures
> should have gismu, instead of some with gismu and some with lujvo.

Yes.

> If you're talking about rafsi, go use zei. 

But zei-words don't quite feel like words. I'm not even sure they 
are defined as a single word in terms of lojban. Can they be used as
the word delimiter for zoi, for example? Can they be quoted with 
zo? (Maybe the answer is yes, but it is not at all intuitive.)

> If you're talking about
> word length, many lujvo have only 2 syllables, and 3 is totally
> fine (hell "parasite" is 3 in english).  What advantage could you
> possibly see for it being a gismu?

Well, if it's a gismu you don't have to worry about possible
misinterpretations of grouping, for example. If you form a lujvo
with a gismu by adding another gismu, there is no possible 
grouping ambiguity. If you do it with a two-part lujvo, then
you have to use brackets to make sure. Not that this is the 
main advantage of gismu, but it is one.

> I think this all rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of lojban
> word classes.  People like to think about gismu, cmavo and lujvo.
> But it's actually brivla, cmavo and cmene. 

Morphologically, the classes are gismu, cmavo, lujvo, fu'ivla and cmene.
Syntactically, the classes are BRIVLA, CMENE, KOhA, A, BAI, TAhE, VAU, etc...

(The Book weirdly compares Lojban morphological classes with English
syntactic classes.)

> Gismu, lujvo and fu'ivla
> are just different types of brivla; none are more privledged than
> the others.

If that were so, then why all the fuss when a new gismu is proposed,
but no fuss when a new lujvo or fu'ivla is proposed? 

mu'o mi'e xorxes



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