Re: [lojban] Random Zipfy question

[Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>]

On Saturday 29 January 2011 22:08:03 Michael Turniansky wrote:
>   How come Spanish, Polish, Hebrew and lojban use only a single letter
> for the concept "and", and English uses three?  Why are we so
> inefficient?

Don't forget that Lojban has different words for "and" depending on what kind 
of grammatical phrase you're connecting. Then, besides "joi", there's "jo'u", 
which is more a natural-language "and" than "e" is, and "ku'a", as in "la 
treid. ku'a la traian. midju la carlyt."

Spanish "y" is a variant of "e" (still used before words beginning with "i"), 
which is a shortening of Latin "et" (which is still spelt that way in French, 
though the "t" is silent). English "and" is from "anti", which is suspected 
to be an Indo-European inflected form of an obsolete noun "hents", 
meaning "face", and preserved as such only in some Anatolian language. Dutch 
shortens it to "en". Norse languages use "og/och", which is cognate to 
German "auch". Greek "kai" (and thus Esperanto "kaj") is suspected of being a 
borrowing from outside the family. Where the Polish and Hebrew words come 
from I don't know.

Pierre
-- 
lo ponse be lo mruli po'o cu ga'ezga roda lo ka dinko

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