I'm about ready to go through the Loglan-English dictionary from
HERE, and essentially relex most of it. Since Ceqli is limited to 70 CV's, or grammar words (14 consonants x 5 full vowels), it just struck me that I can arrange for a very copious set to hold in reserve by the simple expedient of having five "shift key" CV's, thus. the words va, ve, vi, vo, and vu operate as shifts. "Si" is a grammar word, and so are siva, sive, sivi, sivo, and sivu. Hence we have 65 regular CV's, plus 5x65 (325) potential grammar words in the shape CVvC, or 390 grammar words.
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