cmavo
Thank you Xorxes.
That was exactly what I wanted to know.
So the BAI cmavo are almost never used? OK, won't bother with memorizing them.
I do want to memorize the most frequently used cmavo, I'm currently working with the lojban text of 'The Prophet' by Kahlil Gibran and translated by Matt Arnold, and in almost every sentence there's a CV'V cmavo (not even counting the basic "ko'a")
I would be interested to know which CV'V cmavo (and other cmavo) are most used in this particular text and/or in general in lojban text/speech. To know what is worth memorizing and what not.
I remember someone figuring out the most frequent sentence-templates in lojban utterances such as IRC.
Maybe its likewise possible to find out which lojban words are most frequently used in texts. I wonder, would this technically be an easy thing to do? (sorry, I'm no techie)
Thanks,
Tom
From: Jorge LlambÃas <jjllambias@gmail.com>
Subject: lojban-beginners Re: cmavo
To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org
Date: Tuesday, November 25, 2008, 2:04 PM
On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 6:33 PM, Tom Gysel <to_mu1975@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> is there a method to the cmavo-madness?
Some.
> some seem to be derived from gismu (me'e, po'e, ci'o,
ju'o,....)
> others do not.
Correct.
> i cannot find out. are these then randomly chosen?
There are islands of method. For example in vi/va/vu, zi/za/zu/,
ve'i/ve'a/ve'u/ve'e, ze'i/ze'a/ze'u/ze'e, you
can see a rule, so they
were not chosen completely at random. The choice of "v" and
"z" here
might have been random (or inherited from Loglan). You can see another
rule in fa/fe/fi/fo/fu. But there is no rule to cover all cmavo, no.
> is there a way of (more) easily memorizing them?
It's probably worth memorizing all CV cmavo (they are almost all used
with relatively high frequency), it's probably not worth memorizing
all CV'V cmavo. But everyone has their peferred method of learning. I
rather not memorize what is never used, so what I tend to remember is
only what I use or see others using.
> (i mean, i can remember me'e very easily because i see the rafsi of
'cmene')
All BAI cmavo (except do'e and tai actually) have a gismu associated
with them, but they are not necessarily identical to a rafsi of that
gismu. Most of the BAIs are never used however, so I wouldn't
especially recommend commiting them to memmory.
mu'o mi'e xorxes