From pycyn@aol.com Thu Jun 01 10:10:59 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 8158 invoked from network); 1 Jun 2000 17:10:58 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m2.onelist.org with QMQP; 1 Jun 2000 17:10:58 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO imo-d02.mx.aol.com) (205.188.157.34) by mta1 with SMTP; 1 Jun 2000 17:10:58 -0000 Received: from Pycyn@aol.com by imo-d02.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v27.9.) id a.aa.5cda0b6 (3985) for ; Thu, 1 Jun 2000 13:10:56 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2000 13:10:55 EDT Subject: Re: [lojban] rafsi - the Lakhota way? To: lojban@egroups.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: AOL 3.0 16-bit for Windows sub 41 From: pycyn@aol.com In a message dated 00-06-01 09:11:21 EDT, aulun writes << I am wondering if there had been any natural language models borne in mind by the inventor(s) of Lojban for the special way of building lujvo from rafsi-'radicals'? Was it mere necessity for keeping the compounds as short as possible leading to the creation of rafsi, or were there ideas going back e.g. to natural languages of 'incorporating' type (Native American idioms)? >> JCB not being available, I offer my memory of at least the organized version of this, rafsi. From the beginning Loglan had compound words made from bits and pieces of other words, but in not fixed way: bedgo from, I seem to recall, betpu gotso, "go to bed", this in Troika. The aim was generally, I think, to be as short as possible ("appropriately short" in some Ziff's law sense maybe) and so we tended to shoot a gismu patterns, as in the example (cf. the internal constructed gismu of Lojban). This bred confusion, both because gismu were no longer recognizable as such and because the compounds were unanalyzable, needing constant in text explanations (I think I did ganfu for "Heaven" = "god house" gandi husfu, or so, which no one pieced out out of context). But we had to ahve compounds, since the gismu vocabulary was so small. JCB's official story, I remember, was that he got the idea from German, where, he claims a German friend told him, no one needs a dictionary, because all the words bear their meaning on their face. In German you can get away with pretty much running two words (or twenty) together unchanged except for accent patterns, but, although JCB tried that for a while (last vowel of non-final replaced by a glue vowel), that did not fit the Sprachgeist of Loglan. So he set about to regularize the patterns that we had been using anyhow and eventually got to the rafsi system, pretty much as it now exists in Lojban. I think I can say unequivocally that JCB nor anyone around him used any Native American -- or other aggregating -- language pattern. Except German -- and English, let's face it.