Re: Incredible!

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>]

>Make gismu from those by adding any CV at the end of the CCV and KVN
>forms, or a single vowel at the end of the CCVN forms. (Not necessarily
>the same vowel or CV for all. The choice may be arbitrary or follow some
>rule, classifying words in some way.)
>
>All the gismu so obtained are morphologically like the ones we have.
>The rafsi for each is unique and automatically obtainable from the
>gismu, and what is even better, no additional 'r's or 'y's are ever
>needed, and the rafsi are always one-syllable, except when in final
>position. Lujvo are trivially decomposed because each syllable
>always corresponds to a different rafsi.
>
>What criterion would this idea have failed to meet?


Well, the obvious one seems to be that the gismu space is so constrained
that assignment of gismu would have to be nearly random.

It is NOT clear that the word-recognition scores algorithm is that effective
for Lojban gismu making, but I think that there is considerable likelihood
that the assignments are better than random.

A consequence also is that Lojban words have an uneve
n phoneme frequency,
and the frequencies of the phonemes are not unlike the frequencies of
natural languages the words were built from.  A few people have noticed th
at
althought Lojban words look strange, as a text/phoneme string the language
sounds natural.  It is unclear whether a flat distribution would have this
trait.

I can't remember how large the current gismu space is, but it is well over 20K
if my memory is worth anything.  Even including in your less-good ra
fsi
forms would lead to only 5K in the gismu space.

I also think that design-wise we would not have found only 1400 gismu as
an upper limit to be too constraining.  When we started designing the
language we had only 1000 gismu, and this grew to the current 1300.
It may be baselined for the foreseeable future, but I don't think that there
was any evidence back in 1987 that the number of gismu would stop just at this
particular point.  Indeed some of us figured we would end up close to 2000,
based on observations that that number seems to commonly occur as a count
of roots, basic words, etc. in various natural languages.  It may even happen
 eventually that Lojban will get that high, though not for a lot of years.

It wasn't until the first gismu list baselining in 1989 or 1990 (can't remeber
which year) that the consensus settled towards fewer rather than more gismu,
and by that time the morphology was pretty much set in concrete since we
baselined it first (for obvious reasons - you don't want the rules for what
constitutes a word to change after you have started making wordfs).

lojbab