Subject: Re: [lojban] Commas and vowel pairs

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Jan 2001 23:46:51 -0500

At 09:49 PM 01/01/2001 +0000, Richard Curnow wrote:
>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.

I think the resolution of this is found in the alternative 
orthogrography. In short, for the non-diphthong vowel pairs, a word with 
"e,a" is identical to the same word with "e'a", and for diphthongable 
pairs, a word with "e,i" is identical to the same word as "ei" - in other 
words the pronunciation may be changed by the addition of the comma, but 
the resulting word is still the same word as it would be interpreted 
without the comma.

I have not had time to look at your table per this analysis.

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