Subject: Re: [lojban] Uses of 'y'

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 25 Mar 2001 16:17:38

la Avital cusku di'e

>As I understood, 'y' is used only between rafsi in a lujvo, where without
>using 'y', there would be an illegal consonant cluster.

There's also the letterals, by, cy, dy, and so on, but that would
not be a problem. The problem are some lujvo where 'y' is necessary
between what would be a legal cluster. For instance CCVCy rafsi.
Otherwise, a lujvo like CCVC-CVCCV would be indistinguishable
from CCV-CCV-CCV.

>Also, as I
>understand, any consonant cluster which is not 'easy' to pronounce may
>have a 'short un-Lojbanic' vowel in between. If this is true, why is there
>a real need for 'y'? Why can't people just implicitly add 'y', without
>there being a formal letter for 'y'?

The way lujvo morphology was designed, it is unavoidable to have
'y' as a real letter. Of course the morphology could have been made
a lot simpler, but it wasn't. The main reason for that was the
sacredness status given to the five-letter gismu forms. No doubt
that part of the morphology is very nice, but in my opinion not
nice enough to cancel the mess it causes in lujvo.

co'o mi'e xorxes

_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.