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Re: [lojban] fu'ivla tarmi preti

At 12:33 PM 12/14/02 -0500, Pierre Abbat wrote:

According to the Book (or at least the downloadable version), a brivla may
not contain a cluster of more than three consonants, and the second pair in a
cluster must be an initial consonant pair. These rules are violated by the
undefined fu'ivla {bongnanba} and by many type-3 fu'ivla such as
{matcrflokati} and {cidjrspageti}. The rule as I understand it is that there
may not be more than three consonants other than 'r', 'l', 'n', and 'm' in a
row. The rule as implemented in vlatai is that there may not be more than
three non-vocalic consonants in a row, where 'r', 'n', 'l', or 'm' is a
vocalic consonant iff it is between two consonants. Thus {damskrima}, which I
deem valid, is rejected by vlatai, while it accepts {dapmskrima} and
{dasktrsktima}. What is the correct rule?
Nora is of the opinion (which I would probably agree with if I thought about it) that Cowan (and I before him) were not considering fu'ivla when writing most of the morphology rules, because then as now, fu'ivla were considered unimportant fill-ins that did not need careful definition (and indeed such definition was probably impossible). Actually, I think we thought of fu'ivla as being closer to names in terms of rules than brivla.
If you look in the section on fu'ivla (pardon the codes, since this came from the master copy with indexing codes, etc.
<cx "fu'ivla, construction of"><cx "fu'ivla, form of">The form of a fu'ivla reliably distinguishes it from both the gismu and the cmavo. Like cultural gismu, fu'ivla are generally based on a word from a single non-Lojban lan­guage. The word is borrowed(actually copied, hence the Lojban tanru fukpi valsi) from the other language and Lojbanized the phonemes are converted to their closest Lojban equivalent and modifications are made as necessary to make the word a legitimate Lojban fu'ivla-form word. All fu'ivla: 

<p>



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<cx "fu'ivla, rules for formation of"><cx "fu'ivla, initial consonant cluster in"><dl compact><dt>1) <dd>must contain a consonant cluster in the first five letters of the word; if this consonant cluster is at the beginning, it must ei­ther be a permissible initial consonant pair, or a longer cluster such that each pair of adjacent conso­nants in the cluster is a permissi­ble initial consonant pair: spraileis ac­ceptable, but not ktraileor trkaile; 
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<p><dt>2)      <dd>must end in one or more vowels;
</dl><cx "slinku'i test, definition"><dl compact><dt>3) <dd>must not be gismu or lujvo, or any combination of cmavo, gismu, and lujvo; furthermore, a fu'ivla with a CV cmavo joined to the front of it must not have the form of a lujvo (the so-called slinku'i test, not discussed further in this book);
</dl><ex "syllabic pronunciations of consonants, in fu'ivla"><cx "y, prohibition from fu'ivla"><dl compact><dt>4) <dd>cannot contain y, although they may contain syllabic pro­nunciations of Lojban consonants;
</dl><cx "fu'ivla, stress in"><dl compact><dt>5) <dd>like other brivla, are stressed on the penultimate syllable. 

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</dl><cx "fu'ivla, consonant clusters in">Note that consonant triples or larger clusters that are not at the be­ginning of a fu'ivla can be quite flexible, as long as all consonant pairs are permissible. There is no need to re­strict fu'ivla clusters to permis­sible initial pairs except at the beginning. 
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<p>
<cx "fu'ivla, categorized contrasted with uncategorized in ease of construction"><cx "borrowings, Stage 3 contrasted with Stage 4 in ease of construction">This is a fairly liberal definition and allows quite a lot of possi­bilities within fu'ivla space. Stage 3 fu'ivla can be made easily on the fly, as lujvo can, because the procedure for forming them always guarantees a word that cannot violate any of the rules. Stage 4 fu'ivla require running tests that are not simple to characterize or perform, and should be made only after deliberation and by someone knowl­edgeable about all the considerations that apply. 

lojbab

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lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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