Re: word morphology

[CJ FINE <cbmvax!uunet!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!C.J.Fine>]

Thus Frank Schulz:
>
> 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.

I don't think I understand your intent. What you have produced for your
'third cut' is not Lojban, nor even a subset of it.

>
> 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
>

> At this point I believe I have all the word classes that
> are in lojban and all the resolution properties that lojban
> has.

You do have all the word classes (and strictly, more, since gismu, lujvo
and le'avla are not distinguished for the purpose of parsing). But what
of it? Your rule for gismu/lujvo does at least produce a subset of brivla
morphology, but your le'avla and cmene rules are made out of whole cloth
and bear no structural relation to the lojban concepts with the same names.
 I don't know what you mean by the 'resolution properties'. The purpose
of the resolution algorithm in Lojban is to allow a speech stream or
text to be unambiguously parsed into a string of cmene, brivla and
cmavo, and secondarily to resolve the components of lujvo and le'avla.

> I am not sure if lojban allows pauses in cmene or le'avla
> so this might be a difference.

No it doesn't. (But note that most contexts that allow a cmene allow a
sequence of cmene, each necessarily followed by a pause)

> 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?

The reason is that in particular contexts (viz after "la, "lai", "la'i"
and "doi") a cmene need not be preceded by a pause [if it is
vowel-initial it must be so preceded anyway]. I am dubious whether this
freedom is actually worth the cost of prohibiting the syllables from
cmene - I don't think we would find it very hard to get used to saying
"la .bab." and "doi .bab." just as we now have to say "coi .bab." - but
that is how the language is defined at present.

        kolin
                c.j.fine@bradford.ac.uk