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MorphemeAddict@wmconnect.com
wrote: In a message dated 8/24/2009 19:02:46 Eastern Daylight Time, fagricipni@gmail.com writes:Well, IIRC, gismu were never claimed to be truly "fundamental concepts"; that's just asking for trouble (are sheep more fundamental than gazelles? and don't even start on the cultural gismu). They're primitive only in the internal-to-Lojban sense; we would be foolish to claim that they are exhaustively "primitive" in any universal sense. Conversely, I can't see why anyone would feel somehow compelled to add gismu; if you allow end-stage fu'ivla (unmarked) what really is the difference between a fu'ivla and a new gismu? The only functional difference is rafsi, and the original question doesn't even deal with rafsi. So far as I can tell, if new concepts are needed, however fundamental, fu'ivla ought to be able to handle anything. Now, if we start considering rafsi, all kinds of extraneous details start mattering all of a sudden. For example, I noticed a while ago that there is really no need for a gismu that has a CCV rafsi to have any other. CCV rafsi are superior to the others: they can be initial, medial, or final (CVC can't be final) and never need -r- or -n- hyphens to form a consonant cluster if used at the beginning (as CVV or CV'V might), and are always one syllable. When I realized this, I wondered if we weren't "wasting" good rafsi on words that didn't need more than one, while other gismu went without. I was reassured that these rafsi weren't wasted; that the other rafsi for gismu which had CCV rafsi were unavailable for use by any other word anyway. If we start coining new gismu and giving them rafsi, does this have to be taken into account? Surely it would be too late to reassign the "wasted" rafsi, but would that not have a negative impact on the value of the new gismu? Anyway, don't mess with adding gismu. Nothing a really really official fu'ivla can't handle. ~mark |