[lojban] The phonotactics of cmevla

["Jorge Llambías" <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

In Lojban, normal syllables end in a vowel or in a single consonant.
In English (and other languages) there is more leeway. This leads
to borrowings, especially in the case of cmevla, with sequences of
consonants that don't appear in normal Lojban words. It's hard to say
where the limit should be. Requiring Lojbanic syllables only seems too
restrictive (for example it disallows many names that English speakers
will want to use, ending in -rk, -nk, -dj, -ts, etc. On the other
hand, if there
are no restrictions, many names may end up looking nothing like Lojban
words.

What I have done in the current version of the PEG morphology is to
allow any string of phonemes for names in general (maintaining pairwise
acceptability), but I also created a subclass of names "jbocme" for
properly Lojbanic names, which allows only those names that consist
purely of normal Lojban syllables. I think this is could be an acceptable
solution so that the parser doesn't barf on not quite Lojbanic names but
they are flagged as being not quite Lojbanic, thereby giving fully Lojbanized
names a slightly higher status.

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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