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Self Segregation
Hello group!
This is my first post. I have been studying Lojban, and I was
wondering if someone could clarify something for me. As I understand
it, Lojban self-segregates into cmavo, brivla and cmene based on the
pattern of stresses, consonant clusters, pauses, consonant- or vowel-
finalness and syllable count (for brivla, n > 1).
Thus in the sentence fragment "... BAcru le ..." we know
that "bacru" is the gismu and "le" is the cmavo because stress falls
on "ba" and the next syllable contains a consonant cluster and thus
must be the final syllable of the word containing "ba."
What I don't understand at this point is how the language
disambiguates longer brivla which start with a cmavo-look-alike
followed immediately by a legal initial consonant cluster. Pulled
from the current lujvo list, consider:
[1] (brivla) backemselRERkru ?= (cmavo) ba + (brivla) ckemselRERkru
[2] (brivla) dicka'uDENmi "electrically negative" ?= (cmavo) di +
(brivla) cka'uDENmi
[3] (brivla) guSMINra ?= (cmavo) gu + (brivla) SMINra
There are many more examples.
Considering [3], what is to prevent me from analyzing "gusminra" as
cmavo "gu" followed by hypothetical brivla "sminru"? Note
that "sminru":
- ends in a vowel;
- contain a consonant pair in the first five letters;
- is stressed on the next-to-the-last (penultimate) syllable;
thus meeting all the requirements for a brivla.
I am sure it is I who is missing something here; I just can't figure
out what.
Thanks for your time :-)
--- Mike