Hello, I rudely sent the following to Kevin Atkinson initially. (Sorry, Kevin!)
I'm working on a Lojban dict for aspell. Using generic it works quite well. I am, however, running into some trouble with this language's fairly strict rules and am in need of some advice. (Background: Sections 1, 3, 5, and 6 of "Reference Grammar" chapter 4 http://lojban.org/publications/reference_grammar/chapter4.html) First: When a rafsi (gismu short-form, gismu being a root word) in a lujvo (compound word) has the CVV-form and is used at the beginning of a lujvo, a "r" or, in some cases, a "n" is placed at the end (thus creating a CVVC-form) to meet the requirement of brivla (predicate word) having a "...consonant pair in the first five letters, where "y'' and apostrophe are not counted as letters for this purpose." For example, the lujvo "jaurbumru" is made up of the rafsi "jau", which is derived from the gismu "djacu" meaning "water", and the gismu "bumru", meaning "fog". The "r" is used to satisfy the requirement of of a brivla having a consonant pair in the first five letters. "n" could be used in place of "r", also. Second: "y" is used when two rafsi or rasfi + gismu come together and make an invalid consonant pair, such as "ll", "bb", "cc", "dd",.... double consonants in general. For example, (shamelessly taken from the book) the gismu "pante", meaning "protest", and "tavla", meaning "talk", have the rafsi "pat" and "ta'a", respectively. The resulting lujvo, "patta'a", contains a double consonant, thus making it invalid. Adding a "y" between "tt", "patyta'a" makes it valid. Third: Lojban doesn't really require spaces. They do make reading much easier (and so people use them). One thing I'm stuck on is items like ".iji'a". ".i" means "new sentence", as opposed to English's use of ?, ., and ! for "end of sentence". What ".iji'a" is saying here is "(new sentence) In addition,". This is all perfectly legitimate, but the only way I've been able to solved this is by setting run-together-min to 1. Of course, this makes everything valid, so that won't work. Forth: All Lojban characters are to be lower-case. The only exception is names, where you capitalize parts of the name to highlight stresses. For example, the name "Robert" in would "robyt", in UK English, while, in French, it would be "roBER". Now, I don't see any reason to add all the different spellings of names under the sun, so I'll skip that. But, how do I ensure that the words are always lower-case? Thanks, Christopher Hornbaker Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jabber ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.openschooling.org Join the Free State Project! http://www.freestateproject.org "Liberty in Our Lifetime" Was I helpful? Let me know! http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=Jilks _______________________________________________ Aspell-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/aspell-devel
