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At 12:39 AM 6/4/03 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
Lojbab: > >I wonder whether "izpolzovat" is as frequent as "use" > > It would seem so, and there are other words and phrases of significant > length that are common as well. For example, that which we call WW II in > Russian is called such things as the "Great Patriotic War" only taking > twice as many syllables as the English - it seemed to be talked about just > as much despite the long form It is obvious that average word length varies across languages, but I presume you are making a stronger claim that in Russian there is no discernable tendency to shorten longer high frequency words?
No. But I am suggesting that the pressure must not be as great as in English, or the words would have been shortened comparably over the centuries.
> If Lojban is to value precision and > formalism, it WILL have greater length I don't know exactly what point you're making. Lojban is a longwinded language, partly because no effort was made to design it to be otherwise.
And partly because 1) avoidance of polysemy requires more different words to cover the same concept space to the same precision, which either fills up the word space extremely densely (causing noisy-channel communication errors), or longer words and 2) formalism itself is long-winded as is really obvious when we look at formalistic expressions for various interpretations for "only"
My point -- which you dispute in the face of abundant evidence from both lojban usage & natural language -- is that Lojban speakers will be precise and explicit partly in proportion to how longwinded the lojban is.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this. People are precise to the extent that they really desire and need to be precise in order to communicate what they find important.
> Yep. That is indeed a tradeoff. Lojban allows sloppiness. It is the job > of the teachers to make it clear that it is sloppy. After all, in English > we don't see breeds of dog either, > "we see 3 dogs, each representative of a breed which is distinct from the > breeds of the others" It is not certain that English "I saw three kinds of dog(s)" does not encode the meaning that Pierre intended.
It encodes several possible meanings, which context would have to resolve. In some contexts, it might not require seeing any actual dogs at all (metonymy could be in play).
> >So when I say "nobody can find a way to say in Lojban", I mean > >"nobody can find a way to say in the bits of Lojban that have been > >created so far" > > The solution to that is xod's and Jorge's: start creating more Lojban Come again? This is *Lojbab* speaking? Or only his evil twin? Unfortunately the broader community rejects this solution, so we cannot embrace it, though you know I would have dearly loved to.
I seem not to be communicating very well these days. Creating more lojban does not necessarily require changing what has been baselined. Solving "how do you say it" problems adds patterns of expression (a form of idiom) to the language.
> Meanwhile I note that TLI and JCB never seemed to be bothered with only > having around half the gadri that we have and using them even more sloppily How do we know how sloppily they use them in comparison to Lojban?
Some of the ones we added, we did so PRECISELY because the others were being used sloppily.
TLI's equivalent of loi is used for virtually every distinction we have other than lo/le (and they don't in fact have a "lo" per se, but only a "rolo"), all glommed together, as well as (sometimes) to avoid distributive/collective questions.
Also, I can imagine how having fewer gadri might yield fewer usage errors.
For one thing it seems to lead to more use of prenexes, and those prenexes are used sloppily even for someone with my weak logic knowledge. But since they LOOK logical because they are expressed in prenex form, people think they ARE logical.
They've made efforts at times, but for the most part JCB opposed changes that would add to the formalism and eliminate short colloquial forms from meaning whatever he wanted them to mean.
lojbab -- lojbab lojbab@hidden.email Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org