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Lojbab: > 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, I'll accept that, so long as the conclusion is not that zipf is invalid but rather that other cultural forces operating on the language may operate so as to militate against it. > > > 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 cmavo space is tighly crowded and more narrowly confined than it need have been. So I don't think (1) is a real reason. > and 2) formalism itself is long-winded as is > really obvious when we look at formalistic expressions for various > interpretations for "only" I accept that belief in the truth of (2) was a reason for the tolerance of longwindedness. As I have explained many times, though, longwindedness is phonological and logical complexity is semantic. There are ways of mapping semantics to phonology that can make the logically complex shortwinded. > >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 Speakers subtract the cost of the effort of saying X from the benefit of communicating X. The ideal is maximize the net benefit. That principle explains a lot about the way languages are and how they change. > > > >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 Ah, I see now. But given that I said "nobody can find a way to say it in the bits of Lojban that have been created so far", I wonder why you gave an answer that you say meant "the solution is to find a way to say it in the bits of Lojban that have been created so far". > > > 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 I'm not sure that's not true of Lojban usage too... > >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 At least the meaning of a prenexed sentence is clear, even if the speaker has picked the wrong sentence to use. Lojban too requires heavy use of prenexes if it is not mere jboglico, and I imagine that if people start to use prenexes more there'll be lots of mistakes. --And.