RE: [lojban] Why is there so much irregularity in cmavo/gismu?

[Jay Kominek <jay.kominek@colorado.edu>]

On Tue, 13 Nov 2001, Craig wrote:

> The gismu are fine. It's the rafsi that need work. And while we're at it,
> can we get rid of selma'o? They are very misleading. the place structure of
> selma'o is x2 is the grammatical class containing particle x1 - meaning
> that by calling them both UI we put xu and .ui in the same grammar class.
> they play extremely different roles. .ui expresses a feeling. xu makes
> questions. Sounds the same to me!

Can you construct a sentence where replacing a .ui with xu makes it
_grammatically_ incorrect?

Can you construct a sentence where replacing a xu with .ui makes it
_grammatically_ incorrect?

If the answer to both of these is "no", then they are in the same
grammatical catagory no matter how much you want to complain about it.

se cmavo are only a grammatical distinctions, and indicate very little
about semantic function.

Oh, and I seem to rememeber you using 'xu' and '.ui' the last time this
came up. Is 'xu' being in UI the only thing that bothers you about se
cmavo? If you want to junk something, I'd hope there is at least more than
one instance of it annoying you.

And one more thing, if you're going to replace se cmavo, what are you
going to put in its place? Or will all the words be in the same class, and
if we want to refer to ca, pu and bu, we've got to say "those time tense
cmavo"?

- Jay Kominek <jay.kominek@colorado.edu>
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose