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Message-Id: <9112111406.AA22696@relay1.UU.NET>
Date: Wed Dec 11 10:29:18 1991
Reply-To: cbmvax!uunet!pucc.princeton.edu!C.J.Fine
Sender: Lojban list <cbmvax!uunet!pucc.princeton.edu!LOJBAN>
From: CJ FINE <cbmvax!uunet!pucc.princeton.edu!C.J.Fine>
Subject:      Re: response to Cortesi on regular lujvo and glossaries
X-To:         lojbab@GREBYN.com
X-Cc:         Lojban list <lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu>
To: John Cowan <cowan@snark.thyrsus.com>, Ken Taylor <taylor@gca.com>
In-Reply-To:  <no.id>; from "Logical Language Group" at Dec 8, 91 6:17 am
Status: RO
X-From-Space-Date: Wed Dec 11 10:29:18 1991
X-From-Space-Address: cbmvax!uunet!cuvma.bitnet!LOJBAN

lojbab answers Cortesi:
>
> You've left out the important information, which is:  is there context
> sufficient to inform of the sense.  How do you learn new words in
> English?  Mostly by absorption.  You are reading along and digest the
> new word from context, sometimes not even realizing that you've never
> seen it before.  Other times you have to stop and think about it a bit,
> and more rarely, look it up in the dictionary.  But there are many quite
> fluent English readers/speakers that never look words up in
> dictionaries.
>
Lovely examples from my recent experience: 'dissensus' (which I have
come across several times in reading for my course, but have not yet
found in any dictionary), and 'immiserate' (which I did in fact look up in
a dictionary, but te meaning, as with 'dissensus', was obvious).

>
> >Take the affirmative.  It seems to me that this necessarily means that
> >lujvo must be restricted to a starkly regular pattern of arguments,
> >probably nothing more than the argument set of the terminal rafsi (same
> >as tanru).  The reason is the mental burden on /le tecusku goi ko'a/.
> >By the time /le jvovla goi ko'e/ arrives, ko'a has already heard,
> >parsed, and stacked in short-term memory at least one, possibly more,
> >sumti.

Besides lojbab's answer, I would point out that arguing on the basis of
short-term memory requirements is very suspect. The plight of the
interpreter from German is well known ("I'm waiting for the verb!") and
I find German separable prefixes particularly trying (for those
unfamiliar with this, it is as if we expressed an English sentence like
"He will forgo the <some very long sumti>" as
"He will go the <the same sumti> for"!)