Subject: Re: [lojban] Commas and vowel pairs

From: Richard Curnow <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Jan 2001 21:49:15 +0000

On Sun, Dec 31, 2000 at 09:49:02PM +0300, Cyril Slobin wrote:
> 
> As a result of that discussion, my lojban.vim marks all such diphtongs
> as invalid anywhere expect cmene. Of cource I can change this behavour,
> but I really want to know, what exact rule is.
> 
> -- 

Following up on my earlier posting and Cyril's reply ...

To recap, there is a statement in chapter 3 of the Reference Grammar

"Commas are never required: no two Lojban words differ solely because 
of the presence or placement of a comma." 

This appears to contradict some statements in chapter 4, e.g. this example 

7.11) bang,r,kore,a
Korean (the language)

7.12) kuln,r,kore,a
Korean (the culture)

Note the commas in Examples 7.11 and 7.12, used because ``ea'' is not a valid
diphthong in Lojban. Arguably, some form of the native name ``Chosen'' s

In an attempt to resolve this conflict in a reasonable way, I have created the
table below. For each case where two vowels are adjacent in a word, I have
considered the cases of there being a comma between them and of there being no
comma between them. The YES/NO validity is based on the best evidence
available to me, however in some cases I was so unsure I have marked the entry
with a question mark, notes follow below.

I would be very keen to find out (soon!) about errors/disputes in this table,
as I am about to start on including code to do vowel cluster checks in my
revamp of jbofihe's morphology algorithms. Was the validity/invalidity of all
these cases pre-planned into the language, and/or is there any "case law"
dealing with the more obscure ones? If there are any cases that are considered
ambiguous (i.e. subject to possible future ruling), I'd like to know where
these are so I avoid an algorithm which makes those cases hard to change.

General notes on the table :

- the notation [aeo] means any one of the 3 letters a, e or o. So, for
example, [eo][aeou] generates 8 pairings (2x4).

- gismu are not included as they never contain vowel pairs.

- lujvo can only be built from standard rafsi forms. In particular, vowel pairs
only occur in CVV rafsi, and these are all of the first 4 forms.

- cmavo (except VV) containing a vowel pair are of the form CVV; the vowel pair
in all of these is one of the first four.

- VV-form cmavo have a special waiver to allow the second block of ten (ui, ia
etc)

- fu'ivla can never contain the letter y

- cmene can specifically include iy and uy.

-------------+----------------+--------------------------------------
| | Valid in these types of word
| |
Vowel pair | Comma e.g. | cmavo VV- fu'ivla cmene 
| between | lujvo cmavo
-------------+----------------+--------------------------------------
ai|au|ei|oi | NO ai | YES YES YES YES
| YES a,i | NO?(1) NO?(1) YES YES
| |
[iu][aeiou] | NO ia | NO YES YES YES
| YES i,a | NO NO?(1) YES YES
| |
a[aeo] \ | NO ae | NO NO NO?(2) YES?(3)
[eo][aeou] / | YES a,e | NO NO YES YES
| |
[iu]y | NO iy | NO NO NO YES
| YES i,y | NO NO NO YES
| |
[aeo]y | NO ay | NO NO NO NO?(4)
| YES a,y | NO NO NO YES?
| |
y[aeiou] | NO ya | NO NO NO NO?(4)
| YES y,a | NO NO NO YES?
| |
yy | NO yy | NO NO NO NO?(4)
| YES y,y | NO NO NO YES?
-------------+----------------+--------------------------------------

Notes
=====

1. Comma would never be needed as the syllables can't break between vowels.

2. fu'ivla are not allowed to have invalid diphthongs in them?

3. cmene can include any vowel pair (John Cowan's reply cited by Cyril Slobin)

4. .. but y doesn't count as a normal vowel in that sense (the book
specifically allows iy and uy but doesn't mention y adjacent to anything
else?)

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard P. Curnow [email-masked]
Weston-super-Mare
United Kingdom http://go.to/richard.curnow/