John Woldemar Cowan

“ It is valid to use any of the rafsi forms in building lujvo — whichever the reader or listener will most easily understand, or whichever is most pleasing — subject to the rules of lujvo making. There is a scoring algorithm which is intended to determine which of the possible and legal lujvo forms will be the standard dictionary form (see Section 12) .
Each gismu always has at least two rafsi forms; one is the gismu itself (used only at the end of a lujvo) , and one is the gismu without its final vowel (used only at the beginning or middle of a lujvo) . ”

“ If a lujvo is invented which involves the same tanru as one that is in the dictionary, and is assigned a different meaning (or even just a different place structure) , linguistic drift results. This isn’t necessarily bad. Every natural language does it. But in communication, when you use a meaning different from the dictionary definition, someone else may use the dictionary and therefore misunderstand you. You can use the cmavo “za'e” (explained in Chapter 19) before a newly coined lujvo to indicate that it may have a non-dictionary meaning. ”

“ In Lojban, the term “hyphen” always refers to a letter, either the vowel “y” or one of the consonants “r” and “n”. (The letter “l” can also be a hyphen, but is not used as one in lujvo.)
The “y”-hyphen is used after a CVC-form rafsi when joining it with the following rafsi could result in an impermissible consonant pair, or when the resulting lujvo could fall apart into two or more words (either cmavo or gismu) .
Thus, the tanru “pante tavla” (“protest talk”) cannot produce the lujvo “patta'a”, because “tt” is not a permissible consonant pair; the lujvo must be “patyta'a”. ”

“ In general, it is better to use the native name unless using it will severely impede understanding: “Navajo” is far more widely known than “Dine’e”.
cmene Lojbanized names, called “cmene”, are very much like their counterparts in other languages. They are labels applied to things (or people) to stand for them in descriptions or in direct address. They may convey meaning in themselves, but do not necessarily do so.
Because names are often highly personal and individual, Lojban attempts to allow native language names to be used with a minimum of modification. ”

“ Using the conventions defined in Section 1, all gismu are of the forms CVC/CV or CCVCV. They must meet the rules for all brivla given in Section 3; furthermore, they:
always have five letters; always start with a consonant and end with a single vowel; always contain exactly one consonant pair, which is a permissible initial pair (CC) if it’s at the beginning of the gismu, but otherwise only has to be a permissible pair (C/C) ; are always stressed on the first syllable (since that is penultimate) . The five letter length distinguishes gismu from lujvo and fu'ivla. ”

“ The first is that there is usually more than one rafsi that can be used for each gismu. The one to be used is simply whichever one sounds or looks best to the speaker or writer. There are usually many valid combinations of possible rafsi. They all are equally valid, and all of them mean exactly the same thing. (The scoring algorithm given in Section 12 is used to choose the standard form of the lujvo — the version which would be entered into a dictionary.)
The second complication is the serious one. Remember that a tanru is ambiguous — it has several possible meanings. ”

“ As it happens, “spageti” and “kuarka” are valid Stage 4 fu'ivla, but “xaceru” looks like a compound cmavo, and “kobra” like a gismu.
For another example, “integral” has a specific meaning to a mathematician. But the Lojban fu'ivla “integrale”, which is a valid Stage 4 fu'ivla, does not convey that mathematical sense to a non-mathematical listener, even one with an English-speaking background; its source — the English word “integral” — has various other specialized meanings in other fields. ”

“ The gismu were chosen for various reasons: some represent concepts that are very familiar and basic; some represent concepts that are frequently used in other languages; some were added because they would be helpful in constructing more complex words; some because they represent fundamental Lojban concepts (like “cmavo” and “gismu” themselves) . ”

“ All brivla have the following properties:
always end in a vowel; always contain a consonant pair in the first five letters, where “y” and apostrophe are not counted as letters for this purpose. (See Section 6.) always are stressed on the next-to-the-last (penultimate) syllable; this implies that they have two or more syllables. The presence of a consonant pair distinguishes brivla from cmavo and their compounds. The final vowel distinguishes brivla from cmene, which always end in a consonant. Thus “da'amei” must be a compound cmavo because it lacks a consonant pair; “lojban.” ”

“ Some gismu may be superfluous, or appear for historical reasons: the gismu list was being collected for almost 35 years and was only weeded out once. Instead, the intention is that the gismu blanket semantic space: they make it possible to talk about the entire range of human concerns.
There are about 1350 gismu. In learning Lojban, you need only to learn most of these gismu and their combining forms (known as “rafsi”) as well as perhaps 200 major cmavo, and you will be able to communicate effectively in the language. ”

“ A rafsi is then usually attached to the beginning of the Lojbanized form, using a hyphen to ensure that the resulting word doesn’t fall apart.
The rafsi categorizes or limits the meaning of the fu'ivla; otherwise a word having several different jargon meanings in other languages would require the word-inventor to choose which meaning should be assigned to the fu'ivla, since fu'ivla (like other brivla) are not permitted to have more than one definition. Such a Stage 3 borrowing is the most common kind of fu'ivla. ”

“ We will omit the long rafsi from the process, since lujvo containing long rafsi are almost never preferred by the scoring algorithm when there are short rafsi available.
The rafsi for “bloti” are “-lot-”, “-blo-”, and “-lo'i-”; for “klesi” they are “-kle-” and “-lei-”. Both these gismu are among the handful which have both CVV-form and CCV-form rafsi, so there is an unusual number of possibilities available for a two-part tanru:
lotkle blokle lo'ikle lotlei blolei lo'irlei Only “lo'irlei” requires hyphenation (to avoid confusion with the cmavo sequence “lo'i lei”) . ”

“ Note that the algorithm essentially encodes a hierarchy of priorities: short words are preferred (counting apostrophes as half a letter) , then words with fewer hyphens, words with more pleasing rafsi (this judgment is subjective) , and finally words with more vowels are chosen. Each decision principle is applied in turn if the ones before it have failed to choose; it is possible that a lower-ranked principle might dominate a higher-ranked one if it is ten times better than the alternative. ”

“ Test all forms with one or more initial CVC-form rafsi — with the pattern “CVC ... CVC + X” — for “tosmabru failure”. X must either be a CVCCV long rafsi that happens to have a permissible initial pair as the consonant cluster, or is something which has caused a “y”-hyphen to be installed between the previous CVC and itself by one of the above rules. ”

“ Russian “Khrushchev” xrucTCOF. Hindi “Krishna” kricnas. Polish “Lech Walesa” lex. va,uensas. Spanish “Don Quixote” don. kicotes. or modern Spanish: don. kixotes. or Mexican dialect: don. ki'otes. Chinese “Mao Zedong” maudzydyn. Japanese “Fujiko” fudjikos. ”