word morphology

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

I read the lojban morphology document. Very difficult.
To aid in my understanding, I contructed a simpler morphology
that I hope to use as a stepping stone to the lojban morphology.

First cut:
---     .V .VV .V'V CV CVV CV'V are cmavo

Note that when strings like this are run together in connected
speech or writing that unique word resolution is possible. Finally
I really understant why the pause appears in the cmavo list at the front
of some words. Note that stress is not needed for word resolution at this
stage.

Second cut:
---     .V .VV .V'V CV CVV CV'V are cmavo
---     CCV are gismu, string together for lujvo.

Note that these CCV will always combine without creating new
consonant clusters. The hyphens "n" "r" "y" are not needed.
Lojban has 48 initial CC clusters giving 48 * 5 = 240 gismu.
This is short of the 1400 needed.
Note that the word class, cmavo or gismu can be determined by
looking at the first two characters of the word, needing no
lookahead buffering.
Stress is not needed for word resolution.

Third cut:
---     .V .VV .V'V CV CVV CV'V are cmavo
---     CCV are gismu, string together for lujvo.
---     yC[CV]*. are le'avla
---     yV[CV]*. are cmene

le'avla start with a consonant to match the CCV gismu.
cmene start with a vowel to distinguish from le'avla.
Word resolution is still possible without using stress.
The first two characters determine which of the four word
classes a word belongs to.

At this point I believe I have all the word classes that
are in lojban and all the resolution properties that lojban
has. I am not sure if lojban allows pauses in cmene or le'avla
so this might be a difference. Does anyone see any lojban
word resolution capabilities this simple morphology is
missing? Have I missed covering some morphological class?

Also lojban cmene may not have "la" and other stuff. I do not
understand the reason for the restriction. Does this alternate
morphology remove the restriction, with reducing the resolution
capability?
--
        Frank Schulz ( fschulz@pyramid.com )