Re: NAI

[ucleaar <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>]

> Since NAI is a permissible standalone word in an utterance, it is
> a mistake to consider it solely a suffix.

What would a context be for an utterance containing only NAI?

Is {du'u nai kei} grammatical? What does it mean?

> It is of course a word because it meets the Lojban definition of a word.

I don't know what that is. But at any rate, I meant "word" in the vague
but general way it is understood in linguistics.

> You would have a better claim that "ba'e" is a prefix and not a word,
> and likewise "zo", since they CANNOT stand on their own grammatically.
> i suspect there are sveral other selma'o that cannot stand on their
> own either - is "ku" a suffix? is "le" a prefix?

The inability to stand alone is not a sufficient condition for affixhood.
English THE, for example, cannot stand alone, but this is merely because
it requires a following common noun. But I do agree that a good case can
be made for {zo}, and maybe {bae}, being prefixes.

> IN short, I do not see what the point of your claim is - it sounds
> like you wish to choose another definition of "word", one which
> complicates the morphology and the grammar of the language.

There isn't an agreed definition of "word" in linguistics (and it is
my personal belief that grammar contains no entity with characteristics
corresponding to the meaning of the English word _word_), but linguists
would generally agree that a question like "does this utterance contain
20 words or 1?" has some empirical content and is worth debating.

I am not advocating complication of Lojban morphology. I am tentatively
claiming that it already is more complicated than had hitherto been
thought.

At minimum, a word must occupy its own node in syntactic structure,
and I was suggesting that NAI doesn't, and is therefore not a word.
I gave two reasons. The first is semantic: Lojban in general has no
idioms - the sense of a phrase is fully predictable from the meaning
of its parts, whereas the sense of a word is not fully predictable
from the meaning of its parts. By this criterion, {nai} looks like
a suffix. Second, and more interestingly, UI are in general invisible
to other words, but they appear to be visible to NAI. How so? This
is accounted for if the bond between UI and following NAI is
morphological.

> Just as wishing that we called the apostrophe (or h) a consonant
> because it happens to be one in most of linguistics, but would make
> the Lojban design less clear, is less than productive.

I have always approved of what Lojban nowadays does in most cases where
it had used technical terms nonstandardly: it uses Lojban. So we've
dropped "lexeme" and use "selmao" instead, etc. etc. In this case a
Lojbab term to replace "consonant" would be appropriate.

But in my point about NAI I was not quibbling about terminology.

---
And