Subject: Re: [lojban] rafsi - the Lakhota way?

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2000 13:10:55 EDT

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.