[lojban] Re: sel ter vel xel

[Stela Selckiku <selckiku@gmail.com>]

On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 2:57 PM, Luke Bergen<lukeabergen@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?


If you think that changing any small number of things will make Lojban
100% consistent, you have a lot to learn about Lojban. :)


> 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'?".


There's no rules you can learn to generate rafsi, I'm afraid.  You
have to memorize the rafsi.  Some of them are sort of like the gismu,
some are sort of like cmavo, some are pulled out of someone's ass.
That's about all the structure you're going to find to it.


> I know it's a cosmetic thing but it does kind of stick in my head like a
> thorn ya' know?  "sel, ter, vel, xel".  Blech.


OK look, I'm probably just rationalizing, but here's how I think about it.

First, leave "vel" and "xel" out of it.  Quick, what's the first lujvo
that comes to mind with "vel" or "xel"?  The first one that comes to
my mind is: A complete blank.  None at all.  If I think for a while I
can remember occasionally seeing "velsku" and "xelkla".  But they're
rare enough that it doesn't matter much at all what they sound like.

It's the complete opposite with "sel".  It's hard to find lujvo that
don't have "sel".  People all the time refer to second place things as
"sel" + the shortest rafsi they can find-- selkla, selsku, selcme.
Those words are basically an accented "sel" with a few sounds tacked
on the end that tell you what you're even talking about.

In between we have "ter", which is much less common than "sel", but
much more common than "vel" and "xel".  We've already got an excess of
"sel" all over the place, putting the language in danger of having
everything sound the same, so I find it a relief that there's a little
bit of a different sound to "ter" in there.

Obviously it's not perfect spartan efficiency that to say the x2 and
x3 of cmene we can say se cmene, selcmene, or selcme and te cmene,
tercmene, or tercme.  But Lojban is not logical in the old dry way of
the philosophical languages, organizing everything into perfect rows.
It turns out that a little bit of messiness, a little bit of diversity
is necessary in order for a language to be practically useful.  It
might seem more orderly to have all the conversion rafsi sound the
same, but I think it is more practical and aesthetic to hear and write
a diversity of sounds.

People complain all the time about the complexity and quirkiness of
Lojban's way of forming words, but there have been countless projects
over centuries which have tried to invent logical orderly
word-formation processes, and most of them are astoundingly ugly.
There's a reason, though perhaps an illogical one, why Lojban's quirky
lujvo succeeded where Ro's sterile efficiency failed.  Of course it's
easier to think of a simpler way for rafsi to go together.  It's
simple to just make everything even blocks, for instance.  Then it's
easy to split everything apart, because it's all the same.  In Lojban
everything is not all the same-- it's a quirky, weird little language.
 That is why it's the first logical language which so many speakers
have come to love.


mu'o mi'e la stela se ckiku mi'e la .telselkik.


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