And, as you know, Ceqli stress falls on the first syllable, in morphemes and compound words. This leads to something annoying when the augmentive and diminutive gra and pyu are used in the manner of Esperanto -eg and -et. We have:
dom - house
gradom - mansion
Esthetically, I somehow want the head root to be stressed. Am I right, and if I am, would it be rational to redefine gra as "is a augmented version of" and pyu as "is a diminished version of," and consider them the head words:
domgra, pronounce DOMgra.
Or is there any real difference? Like, what's the difference between "human giant" and "giant human"?
Or am I just blinded by the fact that such affixes are suffixes in European languages that I'm most familiar with?
Another thing. I'm considering importing Loglan po, pu, and zo into Ceqli for use in the same manner. Any good Loglanists/Lojbanists out there want to advise me on that? Since I have the principle of terse Ceqli I originally thought that I should replace po with an abstracting suffix, but now I think that's a needless complication, and I can have:
To jino The man
To po jino The state of being a man, manhood
And for terse Ceqli, when we want to dispense with articles, etc. we can let the po serve as is or oodge in to become a prefix of sorts.
Pojino zwar. It's hard to be a man.
And the expanded, precise Ceqli would be
To po jino, da zwar.
This actually works better, and also makes it resemble the original Loglan more.
One more borrowing from Loglan: I want all CV's to be able to take an -r to become predicates. This could even work with that po above. po jino = porjino. Does that make sense? Again, comment here or email me at rmay@mac.com
Loglan and initial Lojban'1987 are lagging behind. New Lojban that is/soon will be incorporating gua\spi features of a simple syntax is a better candidate.
ReplyDeletegua]spi uses only one abstraction little word. And another one for quotations. That's all.
Quantities can be expressed using a separate argument. Qualities are just predicates which have one open place copied from another place.
Anyway I have nothing to add compared to gua\spi. guaspic parser is as easy as hell. Isnt it what an auxlang should aim for?
You need to do for gua\spi what Steve Rice did for Loglan, and write a clear intro to it in English so I can understand it:) BTW, I've never quite grasped the utility of pu and zo, but po makes sense.
ReplyDeleteIt's better to start relexing gua\spi into Ceqli now. It'll result in a language that will be grammatically 90% curren Ceqli. In spoken language it'll be 99% current Ceqli. So no major changes to the grammar will be needed. I don't want to write anything as I don't like guaspic phonology. But if you finish your basic dictionary I might relex guaspi into Ceqli. So I suggest just continue this important work.
DeleteSo what you're saying is that you can take Ceqli vocabulary, once it's done, and replace guaspi vocabulary with it, and all that will work in guaspi grammar? If that's the case, great! I've often wondered about how best to replace the guaspi tone system with something else, and I presume CV's would be the way to go.
DeleteSo maybe we'll end up with three languages with the same basic vocabulary —
DeletePrecise Ceqli, much like Loglan grammatically
Terse Ceqli, rather like Mandarin
and
Guaspish Ceqli, my best effort at creating vocabulary pluse guaspi grammar.
Like, if somebody could just explain the "Grammar by Tones" section starting here (scroll down to it) and going on to the end of the page.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc/guaspi/grammar.html
I simply can't follow it. It's not the difficulty of pronouncing or hearing the tones, it's the business about popping up and down.
Note that Loglan compared to Lojban may have some drawbacks in it's definitions like two separate words for toes and fingers (where Ceqli and Lojban have one word, {fiq} and {degji} respectively). So definitions should be added with care. Analysing guaspi vocabulary is also a must.
ReplyDelete