Re: [lojban] Rafybri and 4 new rafsi. Suggestion for a new agglutinative style in Lojban

Personally, I think you're overestimating the difficulty. Most lujvo can be easily figured out without needing to "memorize" them, as long as you /have/ memorized the gismu, cmavo, and their rafsi, which you /have to do anyway/ to speak Lojban fluently.

I don't see how it is difficult to figure out, without previously learning the definition, that nitkla means "x1 goes down from high point x2 to low point x3 ...". I can see how variants could be what you conclude, as Latro showed, but you should at least be able to understand that "downwards" and "move" constitute the meaning of "nitkla", merely by knowing the meanings of cnita and klama, and also knowing the rafsi thereof.

Also, there's this really great strategy for finding out what a word you don't know means. It's actually an ancient technique, used since the first days of verbal communication: Ask the person that said it.

Lojban is a young language, with no native speakers (although Robin's trying to change the latter), so it's no surprise that most people have difficulties regarding concepts.

The only time I have trouble with a Lojban word, however, is when the meaning is counter-intuitive, that is, when what it means does not seem to fit in with what is used to make it, such as me'ispe. Looking at the word, without knowing the definition, you would think it has something to do with the concepts of "marriage" and "sister", and you may even reach the conclusion that it's talking about someone who is a sister because of a marriage. This makes sense.

me'ispe currently means "Brother-in-Law".

My line of attack for lujvo like the above isn't to try to memorize the meaning, or to come with some addition to the language that will make it more complicated while seeming to make it more simple (any addition is automatically an increase in complexity), but to /fix/ the /broken/ word.

On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 2:41 AM, gleki <gleki.is.my.name@gmail.com> wrote:

My suggestion for rafybri is to eliminate the need to memorise thousands of words which makes Lojban dictionary as hard to memorise as native languages.
If you can say {klama lo cnita} instead of {nitkla} it's ok. If you feel {klama lo cnita} is too long to pronounce you might wanna use rafybri.

The meaning of lujvo is postulated. They need to be entered into dictionaries to be clearly understood by everyone.
The meaning of rafybri is not postulated. You don't have to add them to dictionaries.

Everyone can easily decompress them back to bridi. You don't have to memorise thousands of words.
In some cases, though, lujvo is the best solution (take names of plants and animals, for instance). But "to descend" is really not worth it.

On Wednesday, April 25, 2012 8:05:35 AM UTC+4, Latro wrote:
That's a bias in favor of klama2, which is malgli if it is considered to be inherent (it isn't malgli in an actual lujvo definition). It could just as easily be "below type-of-going" i.e. "going from below" i.e. "rising". This seems less obvious to an English speaker but that's only because of preposition omission; "going below" is "going to below" which is essentially symmetric with the case which favors klama3. There is a similar albeit less natural version for klama4, namely essentially "tunneling", in the physical sense.

On the general topic, I think making a substantive agglutinative system is probably going to wind up being futile in a language like this.

mu'o mi'e latros

On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 2:38 PM, Jonathan Jones <eyeonus@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 8:01 AM, gleki <gleki.is.my.name@gmail.com> wrote:

At first I must say that I'm not a member of any language-developing committee (BPFK or anything).
And the following is just an idea how the flexibility of Lojban can be enriched.
Nobody is asked to use the following when writing or speaking real Lojban.
Everything here should be marked as exclusively experimental and (.a'o) as the source for further consideration.

None of the existing rules of Lojban (the baseline) is changed.

Rafybri

I always noticed how lujvo break the transparent logic of bridi.
Let's look at {nitkla} which means {klama lo cnita}.

Although it's much easier to learn {nitkla} rather then "descend" (in English they differ in sounding considerably)
nobody can guess that {nitkla} means "descend" and doesn't mean "go in a lower position under something" without getting the translation beforehand.

I disagree. I argue that it is actually rather easy to determine the meaning of nitkla.

Let us assume that nitkla is a lujvo formed from the tanru {cnita klama}, which may or may not be true. {cnita klama} is a "below type-of going", i.e.. "going below", i.e. "descending".

How is that difficult to figure out?

Although anybody is free to say "klama lo cnita" instead

it will lead to lengthier speech.

What I suggest is to glue bridi together into a new form of lujvo called "rafybri".
That's how it works.
1. First rule

4 new rafsi
zve <= be fe lo
zvi <= be fi lo
zvo <= be fo lo
zvu <= be fu lo
and
jve (fifth rafsi)
When composing rafybri you replace gismu with rafsi and "be fe lo" etc. with new rafsi of ZVE series.

2. cmavo attached to rafsi don't lead to the emergence of a new meaning. Therefore selpa'i is a synonym for "se prami" (actually the second rule is not a new rule at all).

Applying this rule we can dramatically compress the length of lojbanic jufra.
And if we replace cnita with dizlo in our example we can save even two syllables.
klama lo cnita = klama lo dizlo = kla+zve+dzi = klazvedzi

blanu je crino = blajveri'o. In this case I refer to {blajveri'o} as to a synonym of {blanu je crino} (blue-green). I suggest that no new meaning is added here.

In other words rafybri can be constructed from tanru only if the latter have logical operators

("pelnimre tricu" can't be compressed into rafybri).

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