CCy cmavo

From Lojban
Revision as of 13:10, 27 February 2015 by Gleki (talk | contribs)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Initially proposed by la mudri:

cmavo made up of an initial consonant pair followed by y. could be used as BY, for things like diacritics and non-Lojban letters.

In total, 48 such cmavo are possible.

General CCV cmavo are not allowed because they'd connect to any following brivla. In that situation, they are indistinguishable from rafsi, and are assumed to be rafsi. However, CCy cmavo, like Cy cmavo, are followed by a pause. A pause causes an unconditional word boundary, so CCy cmavo have no chance of combining with a following word.

What about combining with the previous word? Well, were any type of CCV cmavo to combine with the previous word, the only type of word it could form would be a brivla. However, brivla never end with ‘y’, so we don't have this problem.

That's wrapped up, so let's be a bit more ambitious: CGy cmavo, where G ∈ {i, u}. That would yield cmavo like *{kuy.}, which seems like a good fit for ‘Q’. The previous arguments work for this form: ‘.’ can't appear in the middle of a word and ‘y’ can't appear at the end of a brivla. These work for any form which is able to hold together as a single word and ends with ‘y’. We could have CV'y and more.

What we do need to worry about is which CG pairs are valid initials. No native Lojban words, except attitudinals, have on glides at all, and I can't even think of any fu'ivla that contain a CGV cluster.

Objections

As of now cmavo can be disntiguished from other words as they never have consonants in the middle or at the end of them (except ' and . which aren't true consonants). This proposal breaks this situation.

Links