Re: Cowan on morphology

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@GREBYN.COM>]

And's logic escapes me.  If meaning is not predictable, then self-segregating
morphology has no value at all???  And it ADDS complexity to the language
and the task of acquiring vocabulary.

Based on what it replaced - the old Loglan system of cramming words together
in whatever way seemed useful, the Lojban system is immensely better AND
easier both for learning vocabulary, AND for inventing new vocabulary on
the fly - aprocess that will occupy Lojbanists for many years while the
vocabulary remains much smaller than that of English.

Having the self-segregating morphology means that you  need to memorize
the morphological roots that are unique, but as I have argued often before,
this is not that onerous a task since the optional root values are from
a limited set of forms derivable from the gismu, and you can always use
the expanded form that is unambiguously associated with the gismu for any
listener (THE thing to do when you are writing or speaking to an audience
that may not knwo the rafsi well enough to dissassemble your creation, or
 deducethe meaning from context).

However, with that morphology you have significant clues as to meaning, and
moreover, because of the self-segregating quality, you know that a large
body of meaniungs is excluded.  i.e if the final morphological term is a
rafsi for klama (come/go), you know beyond all doubt, that the word relates
to going/coming of some type, and not to being blue, beating your wife, or
compiling a computer program.

It is possible that when you go to make a word, that you may 'invent' a word
that already exists, and use it with a somewhat variant meaning - but it
won't be dramatically variant, and your approximation is one that you can
presumably correct when someone points out that you are a little off.  Since
my observation (heightened by seeing how my kids learn English) is that
language learning is an evolving of successively closer approximations to a
norm, Lojban supports easy language learning of this sort.

lojbab