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LogosInitiative / logla

Logla Prime, a Loglan/Lojban reconciliation
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Allow cvvv cmavo/little words #5

Open trans opened 10 years ago

trans commented 10 years ago

This is a proposal to expand the cmavo phonological space. Note, this is all from the perspective of Lojban, and needs to be updated to take Logan into consideration too.

Presently Lojban's cmavo can only take the form of v, vv, cv and cvv. The v are quickly enumerated, .a, .i, .e, .o, .u and .y.. The vv forms aren't much more difficult. In total there are 4 basic diphthongs (ai, ei, oi and au), 25 aspirated combinations in the form of v'v, and 10 additional semi-voweled pairs (ia, ie, ii, io, iu, ua, ue, ui, uo and uu), for a total of 39. Since Lojban has 17 constants, the cv form has 170 (17 * 10) possibilities. The cvv form can't use the semi-vowel forms, so has a total of 493 (17 * 29). In all there approximately 700 possible cmavo (without venturing into three syllable territory).

Seven hundred possible cmavo seems like a great many. And in terms of pure enumeration it would certainly be enough. The problem however arises that the phonological density is very high. Having to construe completely different meanings from very similar words like fo'a and fo'e, for example, can be very taxing for a human listener. In addition the repetitive use of aspiration (the h sound), as the only constant phoneme allowed to extend the cmavo range, makes Lojban very "breathy". The h sound also does not generally provide a smooth glide from one phoneme to another. Instead it acts much more like a stop --compare aha to ala, causing a slight reduction it rate of speech.

One way to remedy these issues is by relaxing the camvo phonological restrictions to allow a CVVV form where the final vv can be any of the 10 semi-vowel pairs (ua, ui, yo, etc.). This would provide an additional 1,530 (17 * 9 * 10) possible cmavo. More than doubling the current space --plenty of room for some of the current cmavo to be moved over simply by changing the ' to an i or u. This process could be done by hand on a cmavo by cmavo basis, or it could be done systematically by harmonizing the semi-vowels with the vowels they would front.

Making this adjustment appears to create no parsing issues except with regard to the ten vv attitudinals. How to remedy this is an open question.

Below are some arbitrary examples of how utterances might be written and thus sound in contrast to how they are currently (in Lojban).

  li no ga'o bi'i ke'i
  li no gaio bi'i keui
  i do'e le dei nu casnu vau mi pu jungau fi le du'u mi djica la'edi'u i ku'i caku mi za'ure'u jungau
  i doie le dei nu casnu vau mi pu jungau fi le du'u mi djica la'ediiu i kuui caku mi zaiure'u jungau
thetommoore commented 10 years ago

This seems like a good extension. I'm not sure how the ambiguity arises with the attitudinals, though, as they are of the form .VV and would not interact with the pattern CVVV.