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Re: [engelang] Xorban compounding revisited



Mike S. scripsit:

> We don't really have the words yet.  Out of the 1342 gismu, only 647 yield
> unique stems in Xorban.  Of the others, 283 can be retained, and 412 will
> have to be reassigned (assuming we kept the list as-is).  At the same time,
> perhaps 50-100 will be chosen for reduced CC form, and an unknown number of
> other needed predicates, probably 100-200, will be coming in from the cmavo
> list (nearly 100 have rafsi).  Then there will be probably at least 500 (my
> conservative minimum rough guess) gaps and simple concepts that Lojban
> covers with lujvo that we might as well coin basic predicates for to round
> things out while we're looking at this.  Essentially, we will be reforging
> the lexicon from scratch before this is over.  And that would just give us
> a bare-bones vocabulary of 2000 predicates or so, hardly an OED of conlang
> vocabularies.

Indeed, but Lojban gismu are tightly constrained by phonotactic rules that
don't exist in Xorban.  With 18 consonants, there are 18^3 = 5382 regular
predicates, way more than enough.  Even if we exclude stems like mmm-,
mmp-, and pmm-, there are still 5202 available.

-- 
John Cowan  cowan@hidden.email  http://ccil.org/~cowan
The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own
skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among
other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.  --Edsger Dijkstra