response to Cortesi on Mex issues 2/05/92

[Logical Language Group <cbmvax!uunet!GREBYN.COM!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!lojbab>]

Dave raises lots of little points in his postings, some with erroneous
assumptions.

1. rafsi are not words, they are sanctioned abbrevaitions usable in compounds.
There is nothing inherently wrong with having more than one abbreviation form,
especially since in any given word position, one form will likely always be
chosen over the other.

Because they are not words, they cannot stand alone.  Thus "pareci gig ..."
fails because the morphology will call gig a name, pareci gig a sumti, and what
follows either another sumti or something else.

2. zo du na du zo dunli
"du" and "dunli" do not represent the same thing.

Admittedly, "du" was etymologically derived from "dunli" for easy memorization,
and both are glossed as "equal to" in colloquial English.  But they are
different kinds of equality.  "du" is identity, and is more akin to "mintu"
than to "dunli".  But both dunli and mintu have different place structures than
"du", although all three are equally (dunli, not mintu or du) commutative.

3. With all due respect to the British, the megdo and gigdo gismu and their
relatives are based on the metric prefixes, and I hope that a British
Lojbanist will use ci gigdo rather than ciki'o megdo.

But I think they are the same number so it may not matter.

4. ciki'o megdo is not ambiguous.  To incorporate the ki'o rafsi, because it
ius a rafsi, you must use the lujvo-making rules.  "ki'o" like any CVV rafsi
at the beginning of a lujvo (unless the final rafsi is a CCV) must be glued
on with the 'other' hyphen, a vocalic 'r' (or n if necessary).  Thus the lujvo
would be "ci ki'ormegdo", which even more certainly is the same as "ci gigdo"
to my mind.

lojbab