(From Lognet 92/3)
A number of proposals have been considered in the past few months, and decisions have been reached on most of them. In addition, Bill Gober has been invited to participate in Academy discussions.
Jeremy Dunn has proposed a number of additions to the tense system. The tense system is being examined, but no decision has yet been reached on whether extensions such as Dunn has proposed are needed. The specific words proposed were rejected as not following the general word-forming pattern in Loglan.
A minor change has been approved in the bracketing of go expressions by the parser, better to agree with the definition of go in Loglan 1. [Da hasfa go balci la Djek, parses as da (hasfa go [balci {la Djek}]) instead of da (hasfa go balci) (la Djek)].
The Academy has clarified the use of hue. When it refers to the speaker or writer, as in a signature, it is used without a descriptor (as in hue Bab). When it refers to a third person, it is used with a descriptor (hue la Djan, hue le mrenu).
The Academy has also approved a trial of the new LIP (Version 2.2 with Grammar 77). This is described in the column of the Takrultua in this Lognet. The most controversial change is confining non-letteral use of the teo set of letterals to use in acronyms, and the Tai and tei set to anaphora. This has not yet been approved by the Academy, and may not be, so users of LIP should bear this in mind. Alternative solutions to the ambiguity in speech caused by the use of the same letterals in both roles are being considered.
The scope of lao has been extended to include foreign names other than Linnaeans where it is desired to retain the original spelling e.g. Lao Alzheimer, Lao Tokyo. The word sao has been accepted to fill the same role for predicates . (As in the Lognet 92/1 Lo Nurvia Logla ). Sao is normally used only on single words. In both cases the non-Loglan word or string of words must be terminated by a comma or a gu.
An operator for designating sets by listing their elements has been introduced. It is lau, takes any string of lexical elements as its operand, and can be explicitly closed, when necessary, with lua. An example is in the first sentence of our Lo Nurvia Logla in this issue. It is usually used for making lists of arguments. A word to introduce ordered lists is probably needed as well, but has not been chosen as yet.
Until further notice, the Keugru has decided to discourage the use of naked predas as answers, as shown (here and there) in Loglan 1, suggesting that full though shortened utterances are stylistically preferable. Thus, in the interchange ‘La Djan, he?’ ‘Da kapta’ is a better answer than ‘Kapta’. The Keugru is currently considering other ways of solving this clarity problem.
One of us (Steve) pointed out that we have no way of pronouncing ‘*’ to indicate an incorrect Loglan formation. The word niu has been adopted for this, cognate to liu for single-word quotation. Since niu was already assigned to the subtraction operator, the word for the subtraction operator was changed to nio, the corresponding addition sign (formerly piu) to pio, and pio, which was in particular to piu.
It was decided to permit numbers (NI words) as well as LE words to be joined to PO words, thus permitting structures like nepo ‘an event of’, nepu ‘a property of’.
Gober has made a number of proposals. First, he objected, on grounds later withdrawn, to the three chemical elements with unloglandic spelling (ytrio, yterbio, and wlframo). On being reassured by a chemist member that it was not necessary for the chemical symbol letters to occur in the word for the element, it was agreed to change these to itrrio, itrrbio, and ulframo. Because of a subsequent decision it was also agreed that the letter y should never occur in borrowings. So another element-word (dysprosio) containing the letter y has also been changed (to disprrosio?).
In Lognet 91/1 Bill suggested adopting a set of affixes to replace[?] the “ethnic declension” . This was tabled at the time as very limited use was foreseen. It has now been decided to reserve a few sets of currently unused cvV-sets for use in extending declensions to complexes, should this be found useful. Bill has suggested reserving the zeV, ziV, zoV, zuV, and zvV sets for possible declensional use. It is anticipated that these declensional affixes will also be used with primitives and borrowings. The current animal and ethnic declensions will continue to be used.
Bill suggests that a dialect of Loglan could be promulgated for use with beginners or machines, namely one in which all pauses were replaced or accompanied by explicit right-closures; for example, La Djan, gu mrenu would be an utterance in this dialect. A beginner could request da’s teacher to use such heavily “gued” speech by saying Eo meliugu, ‘Please be “gu”ish or something similarly suggestive. We accepted such explicitly “right-closed” speech as an optional style that might well be useful in certain contexts.
The Academy is considering making optionally explicit each of the numerous kinds of modification intentions which occur with some frequency between modifiers and their modificands. This might mean, for example, putting some new infix x in Da horski x janto when ‘Da hunts on horseback’ is intended, and some other infix y in Da simba y janto when ‘Da hunts lions as prey’ is intended. Comments from logli on possible implementations of this plan are welcome.
Two of us (Bill Gober and Steve Rice) independently proposed changes (in Lognet 91/3) with the intention of eliminating the two-pause rule (introduced in Lognet 91/1 ), which we now propose to call a “stop/pause” rule. A break between names, names and predicates used as names, or between a word ending with a vowel and one beginning with one, can be a glottal stop, and is written as a comma-less space between the words, as in La Ailin or in La Djan Pol Djonz. A pause which is grammatical, and which can be replaced by a gu, is always longer than the silences we are now calling stops, and will always be written as a comma followed by a space. The proposals considered did not eliminate all need for the pause/stop distinction, however, and were consequently rejected, on the grounds that unmarked forms are simplest, and should be allowed wherever possible. The Academy agreed, however, that redundant hoi’s, gu’s and gas would be considered discretionary, and not bad usage. In addition, the form Le preda, preda (‘The preda is a prede’ ), while technically correct would now be considered bad usage, and that in human-to-human communications, the form Le preda ga preda should be used. Likewise in forms like La Nordi Amerikas, a hoi should always be used if the final name is intended as a vocative, as in Godzi la Nordi, Hoi Djan (‘Go to the north, O John’ ).
Bill also pointed out that the previous Academy rule that ‘complexes with a borrowing in final position were not recommended’ was unnecessarily restrictive. In the course of considering this problem the whole question of incorporating borrowings into complexes has been reviewed, and a new and exceptionless rule has been adopted. In future, complexes which include borrowings will be made by linking the whole borrowing to its neighbour(s) — which may themselves be borrowings, other predicates, or the short forms of primitives called affixes — with the hyphen ‘y’. Consequently, ‘y’ cannot now be permitted to occur in a borrowing. This in fact is the principal reason why *ytrio and kin must be disallowed and respelled without ‘y,’ e.g. itrrbio. Thus, in future a ‘y’ occurring in a predicate will always be a hyphen, e.g. milyamperi, composed of <mil(ti) + y + amperi> and pronounced [mee-luh-ahm-PER-ee], protoniynuu [proh-ton-nee-uh-NOO-oo], iglluymao [ee-gll-OO-uh-mough]. Since CVV-form affixes linked directly to a borrowing with ‘y’ are interpreted as letter-word prefixes, the long form of the primitive affix should be used when this interpretation is to be avoided (e.g. santyinhuiti, not Saiyinhuiti; for the latter means ‘is an S-Inuit’, not the ‘silent-Inuit’ successfully conveyed by the former.)
You might have noticed the strange double-L-ing in the word iglluymao as the new way of making “igloo-maker”. This is because Bill also discovered that VCCV-form words are ambiguous when CC is a permissible initial, as in *iglu. When certain attachments are present, as in *adjayaspherage, (Asian asparagus) the initial a drops off. These words have been proscribed. There were only four of them in the dictionary, fortunately. When repairing these words, we decided that if one of the consonants in the CC-pair was ‘l’ or ‘r’, it has been doubled (thus, igllu, akrre) and that the double-continuant so produced should join /y/ in making never-stressed syllables and so pass on its stress to the preceding syllable; thus [EE-gll-oo] and [AH-krr-eh]. If neither consonant in the CC was /l r/, an /h/ was prepended; thus *adja and *asne became hadja, hasne and so primitive in form. Consequently, ‘Asian-asparagus’ is now ‘hadjyaspherage’.
Randall Holmes has suggested the addition of laa (Lo Lerci, Lognet 91/1 ) to mean ‘the unique object of which preda holds (if there is such an object, otherwise the empty set)’, and lee (an arbitrarily chosen object satisfying preda if there is such an object, otherwise the empty set.) The Academy adopted these suggestions from our lodtua, who evidently means to make some use of them, soi crano.
Randall also suggested a character quotation operator, to be used like the word quotor liu in syntax. He pointed out that, as it stands liu tei refers to the word tei, not to the character ‘t’, and that there was no way to refer to the character ‘t’! The lodtua and the sacdou jointly proposed that while we were about it we also needed a way to indicate, when quoting, whether we were referring to the spoken form or the written form of the quotand. The Academy considered its options and adopted lii as the new character quotation operator, taking the phoneme string away from the discursive clearly in order to do so. Lii, which had been derived from kliri, has been given the CVV form rea [derived from frena]. Rea had been previously defined as the mathematical operator ‘the root of ‘ which has been little used to date. This operator has been reassigned to suu [related to sua, to the power of ].
When a speaker/writer wants to differentiate between the written and spoken forms of some linguistic string or element, da may now do so by attaching one of the suffixes -zi or -za to any of the quotation words li, lii, liu, lie to make that distinction: -zi for the written form, -za for the spoken one. Thus, liuzi Tai (/liUzi.TAI/) refers to the written word ‘Tai’, while liuza tai (/liUza.TAI/) refers to the phoneme string /tai/. When the speaker/writer is indifferent to the mode of delivery, as da will most often be, da will still be able to use the unmarked form liu Tai as we do now. Clearly, when these compound quotation operators are used, they must be separated from their quotands by pauses, as shown above. To quote the suffix -zi itself, it must be separated from its quotor by a pause, e.g., /liU.zi/, for without a pause, /lioUzi/ would designate the written form of the next occurring word.