Morphology

Before moving onto the main morphology, I'd like to get cmevla out of the way. These are practically the same as dotside Lojban's cmevla. They start with a pause (‘.’) and end with a consonant or schwa followed by a pause. The requirement for a consonant/schwa comes about because pauses can arbitrarily occur between words, so cmevla need a feature that binds them together. When using Shwa, IPA or similar orthographies, any letters can be used in cmevla (except pauses and glottal stops), even those that are not part of the language. Phonotactic rules are also done away with.

All other words begin with an obstruent (“pbtdkgfszh”) or pause, and end with a normal vowel (“oiaue”). In other words, word breaks occur in and only in these environments:

• at a pause or glottal stop (which is part of neither word)
• at the gap between a normal vowel and an adjacent following obstruent

This resembles Ceqli, but has a major difference: obstruents can occur in the middle of a word, in which case they were preceded by a sonorant (“mnrwlj”) or schwa (“y”). This allows much easier importation of loan words. Also – it nearly goes without saying – the scheme here is much simpler than Lojban's, with tosmabru and all. I don't rely on stress, which frees things up for songwriters. I suggest that the reason why there are barely any Lojban versions of existing songs, whether performed or not, is that it's so difficult to get the stress right (I've tried it a few times).

Other than the vowel-obstruent restriction, native words are free in form. There are no formal equivalents to lujvo, with more tanru-like structures taking their place. To keep the classes separate, brivla are required to have at least 1 nasal, and cmavo & tags have none. Like how one can recognise types of Lojban words after little practice, there shouldn't be problems telling the two types apart.

I haven't decided on an equivalent to the gismu creation algorithm yet, though I aim to have a Lojban-style one. With brivla being free-form, I'll need some way of deciding what concepts get a short word, and which get longer ones. I will likely base this on the length of the source words (by some metric).

Just to give an idea of what loan words would look like, here are some language names:

native	cmevla	IPA-style cmevla	brivla
.lojban.	.lozban.	.loʒban.	.lonzba
Ceqli	.tjerlis.	.tʃeŋlis.	tjerli
English	.irglis.	.ɪŋɡlɪʃ.	.irgli
Esperanto	.espelanton.	.esperanton.	.enspelanto
Español	.espanjol.	.espaɲol.	.enspanjo
日本語	.nihorgos.	.nihõŋɡos.	.nirhorgo

There are, of course, ISO code names, but I haven't worked out that system yet. Ceqli doesn't have a code, anyway. Also, stress and tone can be marked in any way that seems fit. For brivla, these have no phonemic value, but they may have in cmevla.