Unified Vocabulary

[trans]

Probably the most difficult reconciliation between Loglan and Lojban will be a unified vocabulary.

With regards to what Lojban calls cmavo, the little words that serve primarily as the grammatical glue, these will have to be worked out on a case by case basis. This is necessary, not simply to select common terms, but also to analyze the purpose and usage of each to ensure they are best.

It is the predicate words, what Lojban calls gismu and lujvo, that require a broader stroke to address. With Lojban's 1,400 words and Loglan's reported 10,000 words, as well as the minor yet significant phonological and morphological differences between them, this will not be a simple task. Nor is the best approach readily apparent. However the simplest approach would be to merge the two, effecting any necessary morphological changes as needed, and patiently reconciling duplicates over time.

This brings up an important point. Since we must take into account any morphological disparities between Loglan and Lojban, we will also have to take into account any morphological changes that may be accepted into Logla's mainline. So reconciling these vocabularies is not something we can do immediately. It does however make it immediately clear that morphological, and consequently phonological, considerations for Logla must be addressed first and most pressingly.

There is also the alternative approach of recreating a whole new set of words. This may seem outright crazy in light of all the work that's come before, but we must consider two important negatives about the current vocabularies: 1) they were developed with no a priori considerations, while in some respects understandable due to its notorious difficulty, it also seems rather disappointing of a logical language, and 2) the vocabularies were created with a mixing algorithm that, converse to its noble intention, rendered a set of root words that no one actually recognizes. For these two reasons it is worth carefully considering the alternatives, each of which will need to be explored in a separate issue.