Re: Cowan on morphology

[Chris Handley <CHandley@GANDALF.OTAGO.AC.NZ>]

After some 'discussion' between And and lojbab, lojbab wrote:
>
> Loglan pre-GMR was very much like what you suggest would be better -
>allowing jbama and klama to both be represented by -ama in a compound. It
>was not as you say - people had to memorize every word they wanted to use,
>and to rely on the dictionary for every little thing they did.  The result
>was that there was far less Loglan text written than you see these days
>being posted to Lojban List.  And people DIDN'T like it, and they
>complained. And one noted linguist (Zwicky) was especially critical of
>this.
>
Apart from anything else, recognising a word from its ending is phenomenally
difficult. If you don't believe me, try a little test. Take twenty words at
random (all about the same length) and divide them into two groups. For one
group supply a definition and the initial syllable, for the other group
supply a definition and the last syllable. Now test your friends and see how
many they get right. I know what I expect, I would like tio see what results
you get.

In the mean time, for all you puzzlers out there, try and find a word with
female connotations that ends in 'unt'. Answer later.


======================================================================
Chris Handley                                     chandley@otago.ac.nz
Dept of Computer Science                       Ph     (+64) 3-479-8499
University of Otago                           Fax     (+64) 3-479-8577
Dunedin, NZ
______________________________________________________________________
              The light at the end of the tunnel has been
                    switched off to conserve power.