Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: (C)V'{i|u}V

From: Richard Curnow <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Aug 2001 22:52:06 +0100

On Fri, Aug 10, 2001 at 05:38:43PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> Richard Curnow scripsit:
> 
> > Others (aa,ae,ao,ea,ee,eo,eu,oa,oe,oo,ou) _could_ be automatically
> > treated as though they have a comma (==apostrophe). But is this
> > entertained by the baseline?
> 
> IMHO no. A word like baa or jbofie is a morphological monstrosity,
> and should be reported as an error, just as brodybri'e should be
> (it cannot be a cmene, cmavo, gismu, lujvo, or fu'ivla).
> 
> The relevant principles are:
> 
> 1. Commas never affect word identity or resolution.
> 
> 2. The 11 illegal pairs can only appear in cmene or fu'ivla, in which
> case they may be pronounced like the corresponding V'Vs
> (so fa'an and fa,an are not distinct names, and bro,aboda and
> bro'aboda are not distinct brivla).
> 
> The whole point of forbidding cmavo like fa,i is that
> it could be understood as fai or fa'i; and likewise for fa,a, fa, and fa'a.
> 

>From this I infer that the sequence "e,a" is treated as "ea" from the
perspective of legality checking and for determining word type, but it
would be pronounced as though it were "e'a". Also, you imply that all
25 vowel pairs can occur in fu'ivla and cmene, with there being an
implied "," inside non-diphthongs.

So we'd have

ai, au, ei, oi :
valid in all words

ia, ie, ii, io, iu, ua, ue, ui, uo, uu :
valid as stand-alone cmavo, in fu'ivla and in cmene

aa, ae, ao, ea, ee, eo, eu, oa, oe, oo, ou :
valid in fu'ivla and cmene (with presence of "," implied)

iu, uy :
valid only in cmene

Is that correct? In all cases, a comma between vowels must effectively
be discarded prior to legality checking and word type determination.
Correct or not?

At the moment, I think jbofihe/vlatai ignore commas appearing between
vowels and consonants. Is that the correct handling?

The algorithm in jbofihe/vlatai v0.37 is inconsistent with John's other mail
about "ci,e", since it treats this as a cmavo. Once the handling of
commas is agreed, I'll generate a patch to fix this.

-- 
R.P.Curnow,Weston-super-Mare,UK |lo samskiro'a cu simsa lo'e glefau
http://www.rrbcurnow.freeuk.com/ |isa'e le xamgu cu tcetcexau ije
[email-masked] |le xlali cu xagmau lenu nomei