u/HectorO760

While trying to figure out what word might work for laptop in Globasa, I was inevitably confronted with the topic of short word forms.

Many languages have borrowed the English word laptop, while others have borrowed the word notebook. Borrowing laptop could potentially work in Globasa, but as a modern technological word it would have to be rendered as laputopu rather than as laptopu (Swahili), since we can't really consider it a culture-specific word. In contrast, a word such as koktel is, by Globasa's standards, borderline culture-specific since it belongs to the food/drink category and the English word, or a calque of it, has been borrowed by almost every language.

At any rate, I think a better option for laptop is to use the calque compound daftari-komputer (notebook computer). It's a long compound, though, and considering this is a frequently used word, a short word form would be convenient. So far, the short word forms peke (personli komputer) and teve (televisi) have been suggested. However, it occurs to me that using the short letter names as syllables to create short word forms might easily lead to undesirable minimal pairs. Also, speakers might be tempted to pronounce these words as initialisms, stressing each syllable: PK and TV. I think initialisms should be reserved exclusively for proper nouns and perhaps some abbreviations.

So for short word forms, I think it might be better to use the actual syllables within the root or compound: perkom for personli komputer and tevi for televisi. That would give us dafkom for daftari-komputer. Anyway, this is worth experimenting with.