li [David Marjanovic] mi tulis la

> > * New suffix -IB. This is actually a split of the -IF
suffix.
> > Due to some big abiguity issues with -IF, this new suffix is
> > being added to distinguish "causing" and "becoming". Now,
it's
> > clear what "sapif" means ("to cause to know" = "teach"),
with
> > it's counterpart being "sapib" ("to come to know" =
"learn"),
> > and derivative words will not be a problem any more.
>
> Why have all those suffixes in the first place? They'll be
> hard to learn for
> most people -- of the big world languages, I can think of one
> that has a
> causative (Arabic) and none that has an incohative (but I
> don't know enough
> about Arabic). I guess they are one of the last reminiscences
> to Esperanto.
> I think you should drop them in favor of verbs that mean
> "cause" (or just
> "make") and "become".

The suffixes are there as building blocks. To keep the
vocabulary as small as possible, the words will need to have
broader meanings. Because of those broad meanings, there is a
need for some way to refine the meanings without being too
verbose so the suffixes are there.


> Also, remember the general warnings about agglutinative
conlangs:
> http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/#e,
> http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/q.html,
> http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/u.html.

I'm very familar with that site, and I have corresponded breifly
with Justin Rye after I contacted him to complement the job he
did on it. He did take a quick look at Sasxsek. His only
criticisms were minor (even by his own admission). Basically
the usual thing about X for /@/, but also mentioned something
about the prepositional marker which is something I'm still
thinking of removing in favor of a more isolating format like
"tu hin u" (at interior of) instead of "(tu)hinu" (inside).

> > sapife = teacher
> > sapibe = learner, student

This is originally what prompted the separation of inchoative
and causative. As a verb, transitivity does tend to make it
easy to figure out but when compounding with other parts there
is still some ambiguity. I figured there is a very strong need
to distinguish not just "teach" and "learn" but also "teacher"
from "student", but don't want to have to resort to adding more
lexicals to get the job done if it can be avoided.

> Why not "make-know person" and "become-know person"? That's
the usual
> Chinese approach (though not to these particular examples). I
> don't see why
> an intl auxlang should be any less analytic than Mandarin.
> Word stress is
> fixed, so there shouldn't be any ambiguities.

Even in Mandarin though the morephemes for "make" and "become"
could be considered affixes. "Person" is also too vague, as the
purpose of "-e" could be a thing as well as a person, though a
thing is more likely to be "-us" (Now that there are a few more
legal diphthongs, I'm thinking about changing this too; maybe
"-ue" or "-ie"?). And, yes there is an overlap between "-e" and
"-o" with statives.

Anyway, for the most part, the Mandarin idea of dropping
unneccesary morphemes will apply to Sasxsek in most cases. If
you want to say something like "teach person" it would be
alright as long as contextually it's known whether this is the
person doin the teaching or the person being taught, but the
building blocks are still there to add precision when needed.


> > * More consonant combinations: Expect /ts/ and /dz/ in
> > medial position to be added soon.
>
> As long as that's not in addition to /tS~dZ/, that's fine.

The affricates /tS/=<c> and /dZ/=<j> have already been added.
/ts/ and /dz/ would be considered clusters, even though they are
probably going to be affricated in speech. Because of that they
would only be used medially and careful vocabulary planning
could avoid confusion. I don't expect to use them in the init
position, and may use them as a final in a few rare cases if at
all. This is just the start of several clusters that are likely
to be added. Like I also mentioned, others are being considered
like /ks/, /st/, /sp/. I'm also probably going to make a pass
through the lexicon and create a few more exclusive relationsips
between consonant pairs that are highly likely to be mistaken
like P/F and B/V.


> > * Under consideration.
> >
> > + Dropping the pejorative and ameliorative (-IH, -IQ)
> > suffixes is also still being contemplated. Either they will
be
> > dropped in favor of some type of qualifier, or not.
>
> Just do it :-)

It probably will happen. I'm stalling because it's low on the
priority list right now. These changes do take quite a bit of
work with all the documentation that needs to be updated. There
have been many changes in the past 2-3 weeks so there's been a
lot to change.