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Re: [lojban] Commas and vowel pairs



At 09:49 PM 01/01/2001 +0000, Richard Curnow wrote:
Following up on my earlier posting and Cyril's reply ...

To recap, there is a statement in chapter 3 of the Reference Grammar
"Commas are never required: no two Lojban words differ solely because
  of the presence or placement of a comma."

This appears to contradict some statements in chapter 4, e.g. this example

  7.11)   bang,r,kore,a
          Korean (the language)

  7.12)   kuln,r,kore,a
          Korean (the culture)

Note the commas in Examples 7.11 and 7.12, used because ``ea'' is not a valid
  diphthong in Lojban.

I think the resolution of this is found in the alternative orthogrography. In short, for the non-diphthong vowel pairs, a word with "e,a" is identical to the same word with "e'a", and for diphthongable pairs, a word with "e,i" is identical to the same word as "ei" - in other words the pronunciation may be changed by the addition of the comma, but the resulting word is still the same word as it would be interpreted without the comma.

I have not had time to look at your table per this analysis.

lojbab
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lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:                 http://www.lojban.org