Subject: hypothetical morphologies (was: RE: [lojban] To clarify...)

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2001 03:15:49 -0000

John:
> And Rosta scripsit:
> 
> > It's interesting that there is such near-unanimity (among those
> > who care about design issues) that the morphology is a disaster
> > and that shorter gismu and no rafsi would have been a much better
> > solution. 
> 
> I at least don't agree. All alternative morphologies known to me
> abandon either self-segregating words or self-segregating morphemes,
> usually at the expense of making everything isolating and abandoning
> the tanru/lujvo distinction, which IMHO is essential to Loglan.
> 
> The only exception is Nora's idea of reserving a vowel for
> "end of brivla". I experimented with a variant of this in 
> my conlang xuxuxi, where there is vowel harmony in all syllables except the
> last, which is "antiharmonic".

When you say "all alternative morphologies known to me", do you mean
all actual proposals, or do you mean that you can't even think of
any workable alternatives? If you disagree with me, I presume you
mean the latter, but I admit I am surprised.

Jorge once posted to the list a rather attractive alternative
morphology, the details of which I don't recall.

The scheme I would offer as my main candidate for a better morphology
has cmavo as CV (or CVCV) and gismu as CCV. Lujvo are formed by adding 
an arbitrarily chosen C between gismu: CCV-C-CCV.

Under such a scheme you almost totally lose the ability to use echoes
of natlangs as memory hooks by design, so the gismu's form--meaning 
matchings would be done on a systematic/patterned basis, so that
gismu with related meanings would pattern together in their forms.

A scheme with CVC gismu (like Vorlin) would lead to forms that would
better lend themselves to natlang echoes, but the segmentation rules
wouldn't be so neat.

> Anyway, if you want Gua\spi, you know where to find it.

But if you want a loglan that combines the best ideas from everybody,
then it's not out there to be found. Of all the projects that set
out to reform Classical Loglan -- Guaspi, Lojban, Ceqli, Voksigid
-- none was conceived as an openended design that would change
whenever ways were found to improve upon it.

--And.