Re: Cowan on morphology

[Mr Andrew Rosta <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>]

> I hate to complain, but could And enlighten us to what he finds baroque
> or ghastly about Lojban morphology.  I can'rt think of anything much
> simpler than having components that represent each possible root, and
> putting them together in the order they would appear in a syntactic
> based compound.  You can call it complex to have multiple choices for the
> morpheme to represent some roots in some positions, but since you can always
> use the longest form, and ALL forms of the root are identical in meaning
> and completely interchangeable, the effects of this polymorphism is minimized
> in terms of langauge understanding, while allowing for a redundancy that
> Lojban like most highly regular conlangs, tends to otherwise lack.

Rafsi have to be memorized: although there is only a finite number of
potential phonological structures for the rafsi of any given gismu,
this number can be quite large, and one has to learn which of this
large number are actually correct. Even after one has learnt one
rafsi, there may still be more rafsi to learn for the same word.

Rafsi are (fairly) freely varying allomorphs, so if a lujvo contains
3 rafsi, and the gismu for each rafsi has 3 rafsi, then this lujvo
has 27 alternative forms. This, I would predict, could vastly impede
word recognition. It is well known that many or most readers recognize
words by their visual shape. Quite possibly when listening we
recognize words holistically by their acoustic shape. Only with
unfamiliar words do we bother to do a morphological breakdown.

The rules for what constitues a legal lujvo are also complicated.

I don't think that the longest forms of rafsi are the ones generally
used. Ju'i Lobypli is read mainly by people with low Lojban competence,
but the journal does not have a policy of using only 5-letter rafsi.
Also, it might be difficult for a competent speaker to remember
to reform familiar lujvo into 5-letter rafsi for the benefit of
a less competent interlocutor.

As for redundancy, I think that for a long time to come the problems
of memorizing the vocabulary will loom larger for Lojban users than
the problems of talking in a noisy environment. Also, the risk
of two brivla having similar sound and equally plausible meaning
in context is less acute than the risk of two cmavo having similar
sounds and equally plausible meaning in context. It's the cmavo
where lack of redundancy is a problem, though even here I think
that the mnemonicity gained is worth the redundancy lost.

------
And.