Re: Comparison of philosophical languages

Shreyas Sampat scripsit:

> Similarly, I don't need to have a grammatical structure for telling my
> listeners that I'm about to say something that's a foreign borrowing.  I
> guarantee you that if I pronounce it even close to correctly, they'll
> notice that I suddenly used a foreign word.  I don't need to know where
> words end and begin because I, like any other human, am smart enough to
> hear words in connected speech.  That's all extraneous information.
In Lojban, unambiguity at the phonological, morphological, and syntactic
levels is an explicit goal, so self-segregating words are a requirement.
Lojban (and Loglan) also provide self-segregating morphemes within words,
though this was not always so.  The reason is to prevent members of the
community from coining identical words that have different morpheme
constituents; for a single language creator, such collisions would be
easily avoided, but in a community, collisions must be prevented.

> And again, I challenge you to give me
> the grammatical role (noun, verb, etc) of any word by its form alone.
I bet there are languages where you can unambiguously tell nouns from
verbs by their infixes, though I can't mention any straight off.

--
A mosquito cried out in his pain,               John Cowan
"A chemist has poisoned my brain!"              http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
        The cause of his sorrow                 http://www.reutershealth.com
        Was para-dichloro-                      jcowan@reutershealth.com
Diphenyltrichloroethane.                                (aka DDT)

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