From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Mon Mar 28 09:09:56 2005 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Mon, 28 Mar 2005 09:09:57 -0800 (PST) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.44) id 1DFxkS-0003T2-QB for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Mon, 28 Mar 2005 09:09:56 -0800 Received: from smtp815.mail.sc5.yahoo.com ([66.163.170.1]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with smtp (Exim 4.44) id 1DFxkQ-0003Ss-6R for lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org; Mon, 28 Mar 2005 09:09:56 -0800 Received: from unknown (HELO ?10.9.30.130?) (bwebber000@ameritech.net@155.139.3.14 with plain) by smtp815.mail.sc5.yahoo.com with SMTP; 28 Mar 2005 17:09:49 -0000 Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2005 11:54:43 -0500 From: Bruce Webber To: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: interrelated vocab word length Re: Re: Hello list [introduction] Message-ID: <2D6763EB5F3E1D6B29A90195@[10.9.30.130]> In-Reply-To: <200503281620.j2SGKjTd027732@mole.e-mol.com> References: <20050327001832.GQ10094@chain.digitalkingdom.org> <200503281620.j2SGKjTd027732@mole.e-mol.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Disposition: inline X-Spam-Score: -2.6 (--) X-archive-position: 1346 X-Approved-By: bruce@brucewebber.com X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-original-sender: bruce@brucewebber.com Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-list: lojban-beginners --On Monday, March 28, 2005 11:20 AM -0500 Matt Arnold wrote: > If you take all the spaces out of a Lojban text, does it change or lose > information? Can they be put back in by a computer? For that matter, what > if you change every consonant to 1 and every vowel to 0? Can the spaces > still be put back in? - epkat > > lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org wrote: >> A Lojban speech stream, with emphasis and a few required pauses, can >> only be decoded in to words in one way. No natural language, that I >> am aware of, has this feature. No homonyms, nor groups of words >> that can be interpreted different ways. A famous English example >> being "ice cream" versus "I scream". >> >> -Robin >> [snip] I believe as long as you indicate the stress somehow (lojban words are stressed on the penultimate (second to last) syllable) and the required pauses, you can remove the spaces and the information will not change. This makes it possible for lojban to be syntactically unambiguous as both a written and spoken language. In some cases the inclusion of spaces is optional. Between cmavo they can be left out. I common example is which consists of and . So the operation of putting the spaces back in may not result in the same text; but the meaning would not change. I don't believe replacing consonants and vowels with 1s and 0s would change this equivalence relation, as long as the stress and pauses are there. I'm a lojban beginner, so accept the above information accordingly. :) -- Bruce