Re: [lojban] Random Zipfy question

[Michael Turniansky <mturniansky@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 10:58 PM, Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu> wrote:
> 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

  Well, in Hebrew, it's only a prefix, the letter vav, rather than
free-standing word..  Since the word "vav" literally means a "hook" it
wouldn't surprise too too much if it ultimately came from a figurative
"hooking" of two words together.  But I could be completely blowing
smoke here....
        --gejyspa
P.S., Russian also uses a single letter,  и, if I am not mistaken.

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