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The Complete Lojban Language

4.13 lujvo-making examples
This section contains examples of making and scoring lujvo. First, we will start with the tanru gerku zdani (“dog house”) and construct a lujvo meaning “doghouse”, that is, a house where a dog lives. We will use a brute-force application of the algorithm in Section 4.12 (p. 69), using every possible rafsi.

The rafsi for gerku are:


 * {| class="wikitable"

|- | -ger-, | -ge'u-, | -gerk-, | -gerku |}

The rafsi for zdani are:


 * {| class="wikitable"

|- | -zda-, | -zdan-, | -zdani. |}

Step 1 of the algorithm directs us to use -ger-, -ge'u- and -gerk- as possible rafsi for gerku; Step 2 directs us to use -zda- and -zdani as possible rafsi for zdani. The six possible forms of the lujvo are then:


 * {| class="wikitable" style="font-style: italic;"

|- | ger -zda |- | ger -zdani |- | ge'u -zda |- | ge'u -zdani |- | gerk -zda |- | gerk -zdani |}

We must then insert appropriate hyphens in each case. The first two forms need no hyphenation: ge cannot fall off the front, because the following word would begin with rz, which is not a permissible initial consonant pair. So the lujvo forms are gerzda and gerzdani.

The third form, ge'u-zda, needs no hyphen, because even though the first rafsi is CVV, the second one is CCV, so there is a consonant cluster in the first five letters. So ge'uzda is this form of the lujvo.

The fourth form, ge'u-zdani, however, requires an r-hyphen; otherwise, the ge'u- part would fall off as a cmavo. So this form of the lujvo is ge'urzdani.

The last two forms require y-hyphens, as all 4-letter rafsi do, and so are gerkyzda and gerkyzdani respectively.

The scoring algorithm is heavily weighted in favor of short lujvo, so we might expect that gerzda would win. Its L score is 6, its A score is 0, its H score is 0, its R score is 12, and its V score is 3, for a final score of 5878. The other forms have scores of 7917, 6367, 9506, 8008, and 10047 respectively. Consequently, this lujvo would probably appear in the dictionary in the form gerzda.

For the next example, we will use the tanru bloti klesi (“boat class”) presumably referring to the category (rowboat, motorboat, cruise liner) into which a boat falls. We will omit the long rafsi from the process, since lujvo containing long rafsi are almost never preferred by the scoring algorithm when there are short rafsi available.

The rafsi for bloti are -lot-, -blo-, and -lo'i-; for klesi they are -kle- and -lei-. Both these gismu are among the handful which have both CVV-form and CCV-form rafsi, so there is an unusual number of possibilities available for a two-part tanru:


 * {| class="wikitable" style="font-style: italic;"

|- | lotkle || blokle || lo'ikle |- | lotlei || blolei || lo'irlei |}

Only lo'irlei requires hyphenation (to avoid confusion with the cmavo sequence lo'i lei). All six forms are valid versions of the lujvo, as are the six further forms using long rafsi; however, the scoring algorithm produces the following results:


 * {| class="wikitable"

|- | lotkle || 5878 |- | blokle || 5858 |- | lo'ikle || 6367 |- | lotlei || 5867 |- | blolei || 5847 |- | lo'irlei || 7456 |}

So the form blolei is preferred, but only by a tiny margin over blokle; "lotlei" and "lotkle" are only slightly worse; lo'ikle suffers because of its apostrophe, and lo'irlei because of having both apostrophe and hyphen.