Re: Lojban

Ceqli <rmay@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>In the charming Yg thread it's said that Lojban has only 1350
>morphemes.  Can that possibly be true?

Lojban has around 1300 roots (what JCB called "prims").  But it also
has grammatical words, some of which can used in compounding (e.g.
numbers), which raises the total to around 1350 words easily used in
compounding.  Those are probably what he means by "morphemes".  But
there are a few hundred "little words" that cannot be compounded
easily and they also would be considered "morphemes" by a linguist.
And like most languages, Lojban has a mechanism for borrowing from
other languages, which could add an arbitrary number of additional
morphemes.

If one adds in compounds and borrowings, probably several tens of
thousands of different words have been used in Lojban text, but most
of them are indeed comprised of around 1350 morphemes (and indeed,
probably only about 2/3 of those have been used in any significant way
in compounding).

lojbab