I know I've read something about a "great rafsi relocation" and that not wanting to cause another one of these is the main reason behind not changing "tel" for stela (lock) to something else is out of the question. But that was a while ago. Is it still completely out of the question to change just one little rafsi so we can have 100% consistency instead of 99.9% consistency?
I just picture teaching my kids lojban and them saying "but dad, you said that there are no exceptions toe the rules in lojban, why is the rafsi of 'te' 'ter' when all the others are just themselves plus 'l'?".
Are there any rules about rafsi besides their forms & the fact that every gismu has at least one? Certainly there is no rule saying that the rafsi for the SE-cmavo have to rhyme. Moreover, {ter-} is so commonly used that the anomaly doesn't seem to cause much difficulty. And I would argue that mistakenly using {tel-} in its place is unlikely to confound, due to the semantic gap between {te} and {stela}. Lastly, a weighty argument against drastically changing word meanings is retention of the intelligibility of existing texts.
I agree that it's annoying, though.
mu'o mi'e komfo,amonan