*old response to paulo

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

>la lojbab. di'e cusku
>>Well, in there cases, it is clear that both the Spanish and the English
>>examples could not be remade so as to get higher scores, since the
>>out of orger phoneme is the second vowels that has to be in final position.
>
>But I did *not* even remotely suggest that the gismu be remade.  I only
>said that not considering letter order in etymologies sometimes (pe'i
>quite often) leads to better memory hooks, as there are longer matches.
>
>>The Arabic example is clearly coincidence since the main ety,mological
>>components were sum from English (probably reinforced by Spanish, I guess
>>without verifying) and "ji" from Chinese.  Arabic always loses against
>>the other languages %^( jumji would have reduced the English score to benefit
>>Arabic, and sumli would have reduced the Chinese score to benefit Arabic.
>
>That's the point. It may be a coincidence, but is also 50% more mnemonic :-)

This is one reason why I want to get some hard LogFlash data.  We may
find that there is another scoring algorithm (taking these things into
account) that describes actual learning of the vocabulary in terms of
the phonemes of the source words which has higher correlation than the
algorithm we used.  Such a different algorithm might be a
scientific result that tells us something meaningful about language acquisition.

>>JCB observed a long time ago that most of the gismu consisted of jamming
>>the English and Chinese togerther optimally, with the other languages
>>serving to make minor adjestments.
>
>For this reason I feel perplex that Loglan claims to have a vocabulary
>based on the eight most widely spoken languages (especially when Arabic
>and Portuguese are not included, being replaced by Japanese, French, and
>German).

Well, using his 1950 population data, those 3 languages he used had
higher native speaking populations than the two we use then had.

The jamming rthe words together was an effect of the algorithm and
weights used, and NOT a statement of the process (well actually, since
he did the word-making manually, I suspect his process WAS not all that
far from what he described - he did miss better scoring words, and quite
often, because he didn;t have an exhaustive search pattern), but in
theory each word he selected was the highest scoring word based on this
objective algorithm that WAS based on the 8 languages.

lojbab