Received: from VMS.DC.LSOFT.COM (vms.dc.lsoft.com [205.186.43.2]) by locke.ccil.org (8.6.9/8.6.10) with ESMTP id QAA28515 for ; Fri, 10 Nov 1995 16:31:45 -0500 Message-Id: <199511102131.QAA28515@locke.ccil.org> Received: from PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM (205.186.43.4) by VMS.DC.LSOFT.COM (LSMTP for OpenVMS v1.0a) with SMTP id 4E06957A ; Fri, 10 Nov 1995 17:27:42 -0400 Date: Thu, 9 Nov 1995 03:43:16 +0300 Reply-To: Cyril Slobin Sender: Lojban list From: Cyril Slobin Organization: Institute for Commercial Engineering Subject: Re: Rafsi Repair Proposal: 1 X-To: Logical Language Group , lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan In-Reply-To: <199511081620.TAA07100@feast.fe.msk.ru>; from "Logical Language G." at Wed, 8 Nov 1995 10:34:21 -0500 Status: OR X-From-Space-Date: Fri Nov 10 16:31:47 1995 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU coi. > Well, Harlow has shown wide variance in length of various translations into > and out of Esperanto. I don't know about utterance length, but Finnish WORDS > are generally longer than English or Lojban ones. Zipf may not even hold in > some languages. The Russian word for "use" is roughly ispolzovat' which in > some declensions can be 5 syllables long. They CAN shorten words, but they > DON'T. Oh, and I don't know about utterance length, but in written text, > Russian sentences sure SEEM longer in both word count and average word length > than similar English of comparable topic and register. I haven't real secure statistics, but I just took pencil and count (of course it may be minor errors - it is not an accurate research). Matthew 7:1-5 Greek English Russian Letters 353 405 337 Words 82 114 74 Average word length 4.30 3.55 4.55 Strange, but russian become shorter in translation. Of course I do not claim it is typical case, but I haven't search especially for anomalies too... Really word lengths distribution chart is much more flat for russian than for english. I have a table (of unknown sourse) of english distribution - 7.33% of words in english text are "the", and first 100 most frequent words cover more then 50% of the text. I haven't table for russian, but I belive that no word cover more than 1% of text. From "russian point of view" there are a dozen very short common verbs in english (use, set, get, put, come, go, have etc - see Basic english verbs list :-) with very overloaded semantic and usage. Of course "ispol'zovat'" is russian for "use", but in most cases where english speaker uses "use", russkij ispol'zuet some other word - in this case "skazhet" (says) instead of "ispol'zuet" (uses) or something else... On the other hand, russian hackers jargon accepts many english words (not only tech terms) - in particular "use" often used among hackers with russian endings "ia usaiu, ty usaesh..." - more often as a joke but not always. > >But English speakers like them for their etymology and register, > >not for their length. Germans and Russians have ways of shortening > >long words (e.g. gestapo, komsomol, etc). > > Yes, but they don't do so except for very common words. And these are > a bit like the acronyms I just mentioned anyway. Really these are very close to lojban lujvo in concept. > xudozhestvennoi sameldeitlnosti (5+7 syllables) - it means roughly > "amateur art show" It is matter of style. I can imagine myself _writing_ these words in some official paper, but it's hard to belive I will really _say_ them. The gape between official and conversational languages seems to be wider in russian than in english... If you want _really_ breaking word, try "vykarabkivaiuschiisia" - adverb with meaning "clumsy climbing out" or something like... :-) co'o mi'e. kir. -- Cyril Slobin `When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, `it means just what I choose it to mean'