lojbab morphology reply

[cbmvax!uunet!PYRAMID.COM!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!fschulz]

In a previous post I described a toy lojban like morphology
using a regular expression grammar. I now suspect that not even
a LR1 grammar is powerful enough to describe the lojban morphology
so that approach is not going to work.

lojbab answered some of my questions that arose during my efforts
to understand the lojban morphology. I still do not follow all the
details. I found his e-mail to be very informative and others may
benefit from a posting. lojbab email follows:

>From uunet!grebyn!lojbab Sun Mar  1 02:43:43 1992
>From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group)
>To: c.j.fine@bradford.ac.uk, fschulz@pyramid.com
>Subject: morphology

I'm going to let Colin answer most of your questions, since I'm falling
behind in my mail due to my added commitments supporting Athelstan's
recovery, as well as my other Lojban work.

These are the type of questions that should be asked on the general list.
And answered there.  If one person doesn't undertsand the morphology, then
probably many don't.

In talking about other morphology proposals, I was mentioning them because
they had been looked at as CONTRASTS to Lojban, not as serious designs
(except sometimes by the proposer).  I don't believe any offer insights
into the Lojban morphology - they are just other ways to design an
unambiguous morphology.  Using JCB's morphology was the only thing we
considered, because we were not trying to invent a new conlang, but to reinvent
Loglan.  And the Loglan morphology is a distinctive feature of JCB's design.

[ in previous mail lojbab mentions other morphologies have been discussed ]

But for your curiosity:  1) end all words with a particular vowel found
nowhere else.  You can then define the innards of the words by any distinctive
method without ambiguity in word breakup.  2) Rex May proposed what JCB
call "Rexlan" which if I recall refuses to make a name/brivla distinction,
or a cmavo/brivla distinction.  All words are some number of C followed by
some number of V followed by l/m/n/r.  The simplest of these are the cmavo.

The Lojban morphology is not that hard.  It is just that the document
that you read was trying to define the morphology rigorously, including
all the crevasses that result when rules run into each other, or the human
vocal tract.  As taught in the textbook, this will become much simpler.
You have cmavo down fine.  gismu are CVCCV or CCVCV.  They may be gramatically
metaphorized into tanru, a very ambiguous process, as discussed in textbook
lesson 4.  They may also be compounded into lujvo which like gismu have a
single meaning/place structure that may be somwhat different from the
paralleling tanru (which always has the place structure of the final term
of the tanru).  The canonical lujvo structure is to replace the final
V of the non-final gismu with 'y' and string them together.  The result, unlike
with tanru, is a single word.  CVCCyCVCCV is an example.

But this means that all 2 termers would be 4 syllables long, and there is
an unambiguous way to shorten these.  We assign shorter rafsi in place
of the 5-letter forms of the gismu.  These combining forms would not work
on their own, but combined with each other, form words that do not overlap
gismu space or cmavo space.  Here though, the human vocal tract and hearing
makes things complicated, because we can't recognize such things as a "cc"
cluster.  So we introduce very specific rules when a 'y' is required, and
when it
can be left out to make the word as short as possible.  This makes the
morphology 'harder', but easier to speak.

Even with gismu and lujvo, there are two possible areas of morphological
space that are unused.  One, the consonant final words, are reserved for names.
The pause need not be marked with the period, though such is standard, but it
must be there are the final consonant, and before an initial vowel.

The la/lai/doi exceptions are made not because their presence makes the
result not a name, but because the result might lead to an ambiguous
lexicalization of part of the name before the "la".

The other chunk of morphological space is for words that end in a vowel, meet
all morphological requirements of Lojban words, but CANNOT be broken down
into rafsi, these being a lujvo.  This irregular space, basically defined by
what is NOT in it, cover the le'avla.

And like I said, all the rest is just special cases, examples, and commentary
on the implications of all this.

You turn, colin?

lojbab


--
        Frank Schulz ( fschulz@pyramid.com )