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Re: [lojban] Re: (C)V'{i|u}V

At 07:52 AM 8/13/01 -0400, John Cowan wrote:

Richard Curnow scripsit:

> From this I infer that the sequence "e,a" is treated as "ea" from the
> perspective of legality checking and for determining word type, but it
> would be pronounced as though it were "e'a".

*May* be pronounced so.

> Also, you imply that all
> 25 vowel pairs can occur in fu'ivla and cmene, with there being an
> implied "," inside non-diphthongs.

I can't seem to find a definite ruling in the Book or elsewhere about
the legality of random vowel pairs in fu'ivla.
It is never forbidden, and several places imply it is acceptable. But page 64 renders the question resolved by example: 
7.11) bang,r,kore,a
Korean (the language)
7.12) kuln,r,kore,a
Korean (the culture)
Note the commas in Examples 7.11 and 7.12, used because "ea" is not a valid diphthong 
in Lojban.




> So we'd have
>
> ai, au, ei, oi :
> valid in all words
>
> ia, ie, ii, io, iu, ua, ue, ui, uo, uu :
> valid as stand-alone cmavo, in fu'ivla and in cmene
>
> aa, ae, ao, ea, ee, eo, eu, oa, oe, oo, ou :
> valid in fu'ivla and cmene (with presence of "," implied)


yes to all of these


> iu, uy :
> valid only in cmene


I think you meant "iy, uy"

By extrapolation from the following on page 35:
Vowel pairs involving "y" appear only in Lojbanized names. They could appear in cmavo (structure words), but only ".y'y." is so used ? it is the Lojban name of the apos-trophe 
letter (see Chapter 17).
I believe that in theory an experimental cmavo could use these with commas or apostrophe (e.g. "ka,iy"), but the book does not say this (the book says very little about what could be used in experimental cmavo other than "a string of vowels" after an initial consonant). 


Yes, unless the 3rd group should be treated like the 4th after all.

> In all cases, a comma between vowels must effectively
> be discarded prior to legality checking and word type determination.

Yes: commas never make a difference.



From the book page 32:
Otherwise, a comma is usually only used to clarify the presence of syllabic "l", "m", "n", or "r" (discussed later). Commas are never required: no two Lojban words differ 
solely because of the presence or placement of a comma.



> At the moment, I think jbofihe/vlatai ignore commas appearing between
> vowels and consonants. Is that the correct handling?

Yes, and likewise between two consonants ("bang,r,blgaria", e.g.).
Given the text on page 32, one could simply ignore the commas in all cases, and if the word is valid without the commas, then it is valid. The indication to pronounce the comma as an apostrophe is a minor contradiction with the text on page 32, since it suggests that "i,e" in a name or whereever could be pronounced as "i'e" but is indistinguishable from "ie". But I think this is a pronunciation issue stemming from our desire to accommodate the alternate orthography, and is not really a morphology issue.
> The algorithm in jbofihe/vlatai v0.37 is inconsistent with John's other mail 
> about "ci,e", since it treats this as a cmavo. Once the handling of
> commas is agreed, I'll generate a patch to fix this.

Yes, that's definitely an error.
I agree that it is an error, though again the comment on page 32 could be stretched to imply it. But the risk of seeing ca,i which WOULD be ambiguous because of the pronunciation issue is reason to say that we should not allow commas in non-experimental cmavo. 

lojbab
--
lojbab lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org