stuff to be removed from the language

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See Rationale for creating Opinionated Gripes page for discussion pertaining to title of this page.

Boo to cultural gismu

decimal prefix gismu (replace with hexadecimal in 4's, or eliminate)

  • I'll take a wild guess and say this was tinkit.
  • See Numbers for a good solution.
    • "kamre" can also be used in order to partially repair this problem, although it should be addressed on a more holistic and larger scale if possible. Note that "xaudbo" reintroduces the problem slightly. A related fix is "xonba".

Synonyms

Some general gismu are needless as they can be replaced with other gismu or lujvo. Which will simplify the language and it's learning.

stress should have no bearing on isolating words, as in "lo jboPREnu" or "LOjbo PREnu"

  • I've wondered about this too - with the same example, as lOjboprEnu is both lo jboprenu and lojbo prenu with proper stress. Actually, my solution is to suggest stressing the first syllable, so lojbo prenu is lOjboprEnu and lo jboprenu is lOjbOprenu. (From my point of view, all this shows is that the prefix lob- is preferable to jbo- after the word lo...) we could always bring back lo'o
    • Changing the morphology to something completely untested is a "solution"? There's an often-overlooked rule - a stressed cmavo must be followed by another cmavo or a pause. Hence lojboprenu can only be "lojbo prenu". However, I realize this could be confusing if you can't tell whether the lo was stressed.
      • Make life easier. Don't ever stress any cmavo.
  • without stress can you distinguish pramicai from prami cai?
  • Yes. In actual practice people pause ever so slightly between words, at least in natlangs.
    • No they don't. Listen to fluent speakers of a language you know nothing about and you'll see.
  • lo jboprenu and lojbo prenu don't fill the same syntactic role, so you can tell them apart by figuring out which interpretation produces a grammatical sentence, or otherwise makes more sense. Are there any examples where two utterances, differentiable only by stress, are syntactically interchangable? --jay
    • lemerkolojboprenuklamalezarci - is the American jbopre going to the store, or is the american going from the store to the jbopre?
      • How can you get either interpretation out of that mess? All I can get are some strange tanru-heavy selbri-less utterances like le merko lo jbopre nu klama le zarci, le merko lo jboprenu klama le zarci, or le merko lojbo prenu klama le zarci. I'd say this is a better example for the importance of cu than anything about stress.
      • That utterance consists of nothing but two sumti.
      • Fine. lomerkolojboprenucuklama. is the merko going to the jboprenu or is the merko lojbo prenu going? Or is it really nothing but sumti, as in lo merko lojbo prenu cukla ma or lo merko lo jboprenu cukla ma - or, even worse, lo merko lo jbopre nu cukla ma?
      • As written it could only be a single sumti: lo merkolojboprenucuklama.merkolojboprenucuklama (one stress only!) is a valid fu'ivla.
        • Well, of course. If you assume the stress is only on the second-to-last syllable, you only get one possible reading. But I assume the point of the person who originally added that was that if you heard lomerkolojboprenucuklama, and didn't hear where the stress was, you wouldn't know what it meant.I don't think that this is a huge problem; it's not difficult to hear the stress in most cases, and in extreme cases you could always pause to make it clearer (lo. jboprenu). This could also be a source of Lojban puns that are more subtle than the "inserting a consonant" kind. --rab.spir
          • Good. Now you have figured out that spoken Lojban must include very emphasized stress on the penultimate, & really cannot afford to have much other stress for emotion or emphasis like we are used to in English. --xod

pauses should have no effect on grammar.

  • The pause is a distinct phoneme in many languages.
  • (Whoever wrote that means, I imagine, that the glottal stop is a phoneme in many languages. Which is true. Things would be less conceptually screwy if this Lojban phoneme were not referred to as "pause". --And Rosta)
    • It was me, and I was thinking specifically of hawai`ian letter `okina, written as ` and pronounced like a full stop in air flow - glottal stop is a rarer allophone.
    • (Who is "me"?!? I don't know what the difference is between a glottal stop and a full stop on airflow. I opine that a glottal stop involves a full stop in airflow. And Rosta) zo'o pacna lenu kakne lenu xruti zo'e lenu vasxu
      • Sorry, forgot to sign that at the end. I = la .kreig.daniyl.
      • Glottal stop = tounge cuts off air by hitting the back of the throat. What I can't figure out how to explain but which I thought was how you pronounce a . in lojban is when you stop exhaling rather than blocking the air and making a sound whilie releasing it.
        • I've never heard that definition for glottal stop. "Glottal" shouldn't have anything to do with the tongue, right?
          • it is a place of articulation, just like palatal or alveolar are. Except for bilabial and labiodental, where there are lips to do it instead, the toungue is the only convenient thing to stop the airflow with. How do you propose doing it?
            • With your epiglottis, of course.Say "uh-oh". The sound between the "uh" and the "oh" is a glottal stop. The tongue is not involved. You can even say it perfectly well holding your tongue in one place.
            • That's not your epiglottis, or it would be an epiglottal stop. A glottal stop is made with (wait for it) the glottis, and basically entails slamming your vocal folds together to block the airflow. That's why a voiced glottal stop is not considered to be articulatorily possible. It has nothing to do with the tongue. --mi'e mark.

Similar gismu

  • vajni: similar to cirko, objects and events are compressed in the x2 place. In both cases, this is not ambiguous, as the type of one sumti implies the type of other sumti. Thoughts?
  • cirko: The glosses, "x1 loses person/thing x2 at/near x3" and "x1 loses property/feature x2 in conditions/situation x3" overload the loss of an object and a feature. Is this a useful compression of gismu space, or does this word have two different meanings?