Subject: RE: [lojban] optional punctuation

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 15:33:09 +0100

John:
> And Rosta wrote:
> 
> > What do lone cmevla outside cmene expressions parse as?
> 
> A bare cmevla is grammatical if it's a stand-alone text;
> the meaning is not clearly defined.
> 
> Bare cmevla used to be vocatives, but this caused grammatical
> problems, so (the Loglan equivalent of) "doi" was introduced.
>
> > they have no other function, and I can't remember why not, or why
> > we are at such pains to make our cmene end in consonants.
> 
> For morphological resolution.

You mean to be identified as cmevla? The terminal glottal stop
is sufficient to delimit the cmene, and since there is no
grammatical distinction between cmevla cmene and noncmevla
cmene and cmevla cannot occur outside cmene, it's hard to see
why everybody is so insistent on having names end in a consonant.

On a related point, was there a clear rationale concerning the
prohibition of impermissible 'clusters' in cmene? Given that on
a pure phonological level Lojban is underlyingly pure CV with
no clusters, and phonetically realizable as such, pronounceability
cannot have been the rationale.

--And.