[lojban] Re: emotions

["And Rosta" <a.rosta@lycos.co.uk>]

Lojbab:
> At 12:48 PM 5/26/03 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
> >It's disyllabic. There is no shortage of bisyllabic cmavo space 
> 
> What is this big need for monosyllabic cmavo, except perhaps for the REALLY 
> frequent and fundamental words of the language like the logical 
> connectives?

Well, right or wrong, that's why no fuss is made about uselessish
disyllabic cmavo. 

As for the big need for monosyllabic cmavo, many many people do care
about the syllable count of their utterances. Reasons would include
syllable count being a measure of effort, and being a measure of
comparative verbosity compared to other languages.

> No one has been hurt, so far as I know, by "le du'u"/"le se du'u" and 
> "la'edi'u" being longer than one syllable, and I can imagine few things 
> that need a shorter one 

I am an atypical lojbanist, but I have been hugely bugged by "lo'edu'u"
and xorxes by "la'edi'u". They don't actively harm me, but it pains me
to use them, to the extent that it poisons my pleasure in using Lojban.
It wouldn't surprise me if future newcomers to Lojban who had the sort
of refined linguistic sensibilities one observes in the likes of
xorxes would be similarly pained.

Not that I don't think it is too late to change Lojban. Lojban is far
into the "take it ot leave it" stage, and can no longer be adapted to
suit the tastes or even the needs of its users.

> The argument for the lerfu-builders being monosyllables was that they never 
> would stand alone, but would always be in a string of several cmavo, and we 
> wanted to keep the string short.  This is turn was motivated by the 
> importance (and frequency) of acronyms in many languages, and the already 
> difficult rendering of Chinese and other non-Roman characters in 
> Lojban.  Unicode has solved the latter, and we seem to be satisfied with 
> other ways to use lerfu.  (Don't know if gamma ray has a lujvo yet, 
> though).  So I could let those go (out of the language or longer cmavo - 
> either way) 

I know the argument. We've discussed it before and it is not really worth 
rehashing, because the effort of arguing about lau/toi wouldn't really
justify the proportionally small benefits of reassigning them. But, to
remind you, the counterargument to your point is that the shortest
cmavo should be assigned to maximize the saving of syllables in actual
usage. The price of making foreign-alphabet acronyms easier is not
worth the cost of making much higher frequency strings longer.
 
--And.