[lojban] Re: "la" rule

[Bob LeChevalier <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

John E Clifford wrote:
> --- Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org> wrote:
>
> > John E Clifford wrote:
> >
> > > I thought {lai} could take stress only if explicitly marked by {ba'e}.  That there would also
> >
> > be
> >
> > > stress on {tl} I pass over as obvious.
> >
> > ba'e is totally independent of any sort of vocal stress.
> >
> > Why would there be stress on "tl"?  It is a monosyllable.  Lojban's 
> > default is penultimate stress, with no stress defined for monosyllabic 
> > words.
>
> Because it is a name and thus receives sentential stress and probably inherent one as well, rule
> or no rule.

I don't know what you mean by those forms of stress.  Lojban has ONLY 
penultimate syllable stress.  No other form of stress has any semantic 
or grammatical or pragmatic meaning BY DEFINITION (which is why we have 
ba'e for the other kind of stress that I knew needed representation), 
and no other form of stress is allowed which conflicts with the one 
required form.

There is no reason in Lojban to stress a monosyllable name, or to not 
stress a monosyllable name.

> It seems to me that no trick so far discussed will work in practice: we will not remember to
> exempt certain syllables from names, we will forget pauses (though making {la} and the like to be
> learned as {la.} where the period is a genuine glottal stop might improve things).

That is the essence of the problem.

Without a solution that unquestionably will work and be used in 
practice, the justification for changing the baselined status quo isn't 
there.

Those who like the pause-all-the-time solution can implement the 
practice of pausing all the time to show that in fact people can and 
will learn to do so, which could at least partially negate this 
argument; that is a legal dialect.  I suspect such a dialect would be 
aesthetically displeasing, but we'd be able to judge by example.

> Again, using
> something that occurs nowhere else (the glottal stop is a difficult-to-use-or-remember-or-hear
> example) seems the safest route (and can be used, as was pointed out some time ago, to deal with
> borrowings as well).

We tried the "something that occurs nowhere else" trick for fu'ivla 
compounding, using ",iy," as the hyphen.  I think someone eventually 
came up with a "somewhere else" and it was aesthetically displeasing to 
people as well.

The only surefire way to do that is to mark names with a cmavo that uses 
a phoneme found nowhere else in the language, including the letteral 
word for the phoneme.

I wouldn't even consider trying to sell that to the community, since I 
wouldn't support it myself under any conditions I can imagine.

lojbab



To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to lojban-list-request@lojban.org
with the subject unsubscribe, or go to http://www.lojban.org/lsg2/, or if
you're really stuck, send mail to secretary@lojban.org for help.