Subject: [lojban] Re: Loglan

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 17:48:16 -0500 (EST)

Robert McIvor scripsit:

> but I used my veto power successfully on two of JCB's changes that I 
> thought were inconsistent with Loglan principles.

Out of curiosity, what were those changes?

> I would say that the 
> Academy followed And's opinion. Maintain the status quo, but be open 
> to extensions and corrections as needed.
> The commonest changes were assignment of unassigned rafsi,

I think there's only one rafsi that still *could* be assigned to a word
that doesn't currently have any. Some other words could get an additional
rafsi, but there isn't much point.

For some reason not known to me, Lojban adopted an extra constraint with
the rafsi: no more than one CVV, one CCV, and one CVC. Loglan allows
up to 3 rafsi, but there can be more than one of a given form.
For example, felda (Lojban farlu) has rafsi fel, fed, fea.

Lojbab, do you remember why this changed?

> and place 
> structure modification, though I resisted changes to places to 
> well-known words.

I think the community as a whole has given up on fixing gismu places:
too much work, too little life. :-)

> Any author could add lujvo as needed.

Naturally.

> The name of your 'slinkui' rule is based on a Loglan word 'paslinkui' 
> which could
> break to pa slinkui if slinkui were a legitimate word. Actually, later 
> we abandoned the
> slinkui restriction by requiring paslinkui type words to be hyphenated 
> as pasylinkui.

We thought about that, but it didn't seem to make sense to favor borrowings
over complexes.

-- 
John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan <[email-masked]>
"Any legal document draws most of its meaning from context. A telegram
that says 'SELL HUNDRED THOUSAND SHARES IBM SHORT' (only 190 bits in
5-bit Baudot code plus appropriate headers) is as good a legal document
as any, even sans digital signature." --me