Re: Dr. James Cooke Brown

[John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>]

Emerson Mitchell wrote:

> Here's another friendly suggestion: each side should check the other sides
> dictionary for words that could be incorporated unchanged without damage to
> the respective grammers.

Not sure what this would mean.  In prim/gismu space, there are definitely
both soft collisions like "blanu" (Loglan: x1 is bluer than x2; Lojban:
x1 is blue) and "barda" (Loglan: x1 rewards x2 for action x3 with reward x4;
Lojban: x1 is large in dimension x2 by standard x3).  But even if we
eliminate these, what is the point of having both Loglan "nirda" and
Lojban "cipni" for "bird", particularly with the minute difference that
the x2 of "cipni" specifies the species of bird, whereas "nirda" lacks x2?

As for LWs/cmavo, the Lojban cmavo space is larger than the Loglan
one and is essentially full: there are 25 x 18 possible Loglan LWs, but
there are 30 x 18 + 11 possible Lojban cmavo.  There is a large experimental
cmavo space in Lojban that Loglan doesn't allow for, essentially LWs
like "laoa" (Lojban "la'o'a").

> My first thought was that each language could start by making the name for
> the other an accepted primitive. 

Names as such aren't really prims/gismu: the gismu "lojbo" means "pertaining
to Loglan/Lojban/logical languages", and doesn't *name* anything.  Luckily,
both names are legal in both languages, although "loglan." was for a long time
not a legal Lojban name, because of the embedded "la".

-- 

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