Proposal 10 (meta): stop using "lexeme" and "affix"

[John Cowan]

The Loglan Project uses the terms "affix" and "lexeme" in ways that
contradict standard linguistic usage. Our complexes are composed entirely
of affixes, but an affix to a linguist is either a suffix or a prefix:
there must be a root to which they are attached. I suggest we switch to
the neutral term "combining form" until we have a Loglan term analogous
to Lojban "rafsi".

Similarly, a "lexeme" is not a word class based on syntactic
interchangeability, but one based on sharing an underlying form to which
different inflections are added. Thus "run", "runs", "running", "ran"
are all members of the "run" lexeme in English ("runner" is not, as the
"-er" ending derives a new lexeme). We should instead use "nurcmapua",
X is a little-word class including Y.

Of course, this applies only to formal proposals and documentation and
where clarity is needed, not to casual loglandic chitchat.

--
John Cowan co...@ccil.org http://ccil.org/~cowan
If he has seen farther than others,
it is because he is standing on a stack of dwarves.
--Mike Champion, describing Tim Berners-Lee (adapted)

[Randall Holmes]

I agree that the terminology is nonstandard, and that we should think about both

the correct English technical linguistic terminology for our basic units of meaning

and the deployment of Loglan words for the same concepts.

My first comment:  in the strict sense, Loglan has very few "affixes".  The djifoa are variant forms of roots, in fact.

(we *have* a word, djifoa, which is defined as "affix" (in our local sense) " or "combining form")

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Sincerely, Randall Holmes

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[Randall Holmes]

Nurcmapua is an excellent word, but of course there are a couple of other "lexemes" so we need a more general word as well.

[Randall Holmes]

Ei mu tsubae cmiza mu?