From jcowan@reutershealth.com Thu Jun 01 10:29:07 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 18180 invoked from network); 1 Jun 2000 17:29:07 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m4.onelist.org with QMQP; 1 Jun 2000 17:29:07 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail.reutershealth.com) (204.243.9.36) by mta1 with SMTP; 1 Jun 2000 17:29:06 -0000 Received: from reutershealth.com (IDENT:cowan@skunk.reutershealth.com [204.243.9.153]) by mail.reutershealth.com (Pro-8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id NAA08452 for ; Thu, 1 Jun 2000 13:29:05 -0400 (EDT) Sender: cowan@mail.reutershealth.com Message-ID: <39369D3D.C8CB284B@reutershealth.com> Date: Thu, 01 Jun 2000 13:28:29 -0400 Organization: Reuters Health Information X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.2.5-15 i686) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban@egroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] rafsi - the Lakhota way? References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: John Cowan pycyn@aol.com wrote: > 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. And in Robert Rimmer's _Love Me Tomorrow_, too. > This bred confusion, both > because gismu were no longer recognizable as such and because the compounds > were unanalyzable, needing constant in text explanations That's the main reason for having a rafsi system: the need to keep words separable (so that lujvo and tanru are not the same thing) as well as keeping morphemes separable and reconstructible. AFAIK no other conlang does both. > (I think I did ganfu for "Heaven" = "god house" gandi husfu, or so, which no > one pieced out out of context). And even if I had guessed the tanru, I would have assumed "church". But that's a separate problem. > 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. Essentially true, or at least it is what Germans believe. > [A]lthough JCB tried that for a while (last vowel of > non-final replaced by a glue vowel), that did not fit the Sprachgeist of > Loglan. Of course both Loglan and Lojban *can* make fully-unreduced compounds in this way. > 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. One minor difference is that in Loglan, a gismu can have more than one rafsi of a given form (CCV, CVV, CVC), although still no more than three at most. -- Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis um dies! || John Cowan Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau, || http://www.reutershealth.com Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau, || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan Und trank die Milch vom Paradies. -- Coleridge (tr. Politzer)