Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Loglan

From: Robert LeChevalier <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 04 Dec 2002 21:47:12 -0500

At 05:48 PM 12/4/02 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
>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?

It made the assignment job easier, as well as the job of learning the 
rafsi: if you know there can only be one CVC, then if you know one, then 
there are no more. This was (I thought, and whoever I consulted agreed) 
better at addressing arguments that the rafsi system was difficult to 
learn. The cost is the occasional hyphen that might be required by one CVC 
that could have been eliminated by having a second one. Given that we 
could not eliminate more than a small fraction of such hyphens (I think it 
was under 5% and probably more like 1% of the set of hypothetical lujvo 
used for tuning), easier learning took precedence.

In the 1994 retuning of rafsi assignments, we went even further, 
eliminating some CVVs when there was a CCV and vice versa.

(BTW, Thanks to Bob McIvor for speaking up. I don't have anything to 
comment on his messages, but feel it far better when Bob speaks for TLI 
interests rather than me.)

lojbab

-- 
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org