mublin wrote: > <off-topic>
"when necessary." -- Unlike its equivalents in many languages, ``tunba'' gives us an option to qualify by gender, rather than forcing us to do so. In this light, it would have been even better to eliminate the redundant ``bruna'' and ``mensi''. </off-topic>
If the goal at the time had been to truly design a new language, we probably would have seriously considered doing so. But Lojban was being created as a negotiating position with language inventor JCB, and thus we strove for backwards compatibility and did not reinvent anything that we didn't feel had to be reinvented. The words in JCBs lexicon that we eliminated were words that should never have been gismu by any argument, but were created at the time when there wasn't a true morphological distinction between roots and compounds (and no fu'ivla space), so there were gismu-shaped fu'ivla and what we would consider lujvo shaped fu'ivla. (e.g. "bilra" = "billiards" and "futbo" = "football" (never defined as to whether this meant American or soccer).
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