coi pan,
The patterns weren't designed that way. Gismu were all generated to approximate common words (with weights for more spoken languages) from the six original source languages. It just so happens that:
English:"man", Chinese"nanren", Arabic: "nsan" etc..-> { nanmu }
Chinese"nanhai", Spanish "ninio," Arabic: "uladn" etc.. -> { nanla }
I guess the abundance of "nan"-like syllables in natural languages was in part to the (weighted) chinese character "nan" (男) that's in both of them, in conjunction with similar coincidental syllables in other heavily weighted languages.
The female counterpart "ni" (女) character seems to have also influenced the female gismus, but without as much agreement on that second consonant.
Hope that clears it up a little!
co'o
On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 07:18, Pan Mistwood
<panmistwood@gmail.com> wrote:
Back when I first dove into learning Lojban, I noticed an apparent
inconsistency with four gismu. And as far as I can tell, there's no
reason for it, but I could be mistaken. So, after much
procrastination, I'm asking about it here. (And as far as I could find
with Google Web search and a search within this group, it hasn't been
brought up before, which is rather surprising to me.)
The gismu "nanmu" virtually means the English "man" or, more
generally, "male humanoid". The gismu "ninmu" virtually means the
English "woman" or "female humanoid". The gismu "nanla" virtually
means the English "boy". Now, I understand that they are not preferred
over the gismu "verba", "remna", and "prenu", but they do exist and
are recognised as Lojbanic gismu.
From those gismu, I can see a pattern. "nanmu" and "nanla" share "na-"
while "nanla" and "nanmu" share "-mu". Following this pattern, the
gismu virtually meaning the English "girl" would be "ninla"; "ni-" as
in "ninmu" and "-la" as in "nanla". However, the gismu is actually
"nixli". My question: as "ninla" is valid gismu syntax, is consistent
with "nanmu", "nanla", and "ninmu", and is not already used to mean
something else, why is "nixli" used instead?
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