rafsi

["John E. Clifford" <pcliffje@CRL.COM>]

mark,l
Homophone affix ambiguity -- the fact that hundreds of short rafsi are
identical to cmavo with unrelated meanings -- does not lead to the
creation of ambiguous sentences.  The ambiguity does not "reach" to the
sentence "level."  You can always disambiguate before the sentence is
finished.
pc:
This, of course, is a misleading way of saying "There is no
ambiguity here", since an ambiguity only exists if it makes a
difference in utterance meaning.  What is left is a minor
processing slowdown -- not even so long a one as deciphering
a compound *known to be a compound*:
mark,l:
You're listening to a Lojban utterance (or reading a Lojban text).  Along
the stream of speech (or string of text) comes a form (such as CVV or
CV'V) that you recognize immediately as being meaningful in Lojban.  Yet
you cannot know its meaning as quickly, if it's one of the 295 such forms
with two unrelated meanings; you must hesitate between the two possible
meanings.
Meanwhile, the stream (or string) keeps flowing.  As soon as you hit a
word boundary -- judging this by stress in speech (or by spacing in text)
-- you can disambiguate.  If the form stood alone it was a cmavo, so you
settle on the cmavo meaning.  If the form was part of a compound, you
must reckon whether the compound was a lujvo or a compound cmavo --
judging this by the presence or absence of a consonant pair (or of -r- or
-y- hyphenation).  If the compound was a lujvo, then you settle on the
rafsi meaning.
pc:
Recheck the resolution algorithms again.  You usually know
that something is a rafsi immediately and the doubt never lasts
longer than two phones -- less than one morph, let alone to
word boundary.
        If you are in the midst of a brivla, between (inclusive)
a CC and primary stress, then any CVV is a rafsi.  Otherwise
it is one exactly if it is followed imediately by rC or nr (at the
beginning of a lujvo).  All remaining cases are cmavo.

This does not represent a perceptable delay in the
interpretation process.

Learning rafsi as part of learning gismu and learning cmavo
separately -- or learning both directly from running text --
remove the purported learning problems with the
"homophones;"  those problems look like the kind that come
with memorizing alphabetic lists -- a bad langauge-learning
technique.

I see no reason left for the complications and lengthening that
this proposal requires (even ignoring that it scraps a pile of
baselined material).

Proper learning
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