X-Digest-Num: 273 Message-ID: <44114.273.1526.959273825@eGroups.com> Date: Mon, 01 Nov 1999 18:25:28 -0500 From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" Subject: Re: lojban newbie: an outsider looking in X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 1526 Content-Length: 2178 Lines: 48 At 07:24 PM 10/31/99 -0500, Michal Wallace (sabren) wrote: >From: "Michal Wallace (sabren)" >On Wed, 27 Oct 1999, Jorge Llambias wrote: > > > >There is some kind of magical trick > > >to this process that ensures that no two lojban words are ever the same. > > > > Not magical, but admittedly a little more complicated > > than it need have been. > >Having read a bit more... I think it makes a lot of sense.. >I'm still not clear whether all gismu have the same patterns for >their rafsi or not. Given a gismu you've never seen, should you >be able to tell the rafsi? Not precisely. You will know the set of all possible rafsi that could be used. You know that no rafsi is used for more than one gismu, but that we try to use all rafsi for something if it is plausible that they stand for something. You also know that no gismu has more than one of each of the three possible forms CVC CVV and CCV. Given these rules, the more rafsi you know definitively, the more likely you will be sure what the rafsi are for a gismu you newly study. Example: klama has the possible rafsi determined by its word form of kam, lam, ka'a, la'a, and kla. No others are possible. If you know already that kam is the rafsi for cmavo ka, ka'a the rafsi for katna, la'a for lasna, and lam for lamji, then you know that klama could only have kla. It turns out that there are 6 other words that could have been assigned "kla", but klama is clearly the most frequent of these (and has no other short rafsi) so it gets the rafsi. This logic sounds a little convoluted for a single gismu, but you find that after you know maybe 20% of the rafsi, you seem to be able to guess with 80-90% accuracy what the rafsi will be for a given gismu. lojbab ---- lojbab ***NOTE NEW ADDRESS*** lojbab@lojban.org Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: see Lojban WWW Server: href=" http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban/ " Order _The Complete Lojban Language_ - see our Web pages or ask me.