From robin@BILKENT.EDU.TR Wed Apr 10 13:34:09 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: robin@real-time.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_0_3_1); 10 Apr 2002 20:34:09 -0000 Received: (qmail 55276 invoked from network); 10 Apr 2002 20:34:04 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.217) by m5.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 10 Apr 2002 20:34:04 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO localhost.localdomain) (139.179.111.28) by mta2.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 10 Apr 2002 20:34:02 -0000 Received: from localhost (localhost [[UNIX: localhost]]) by localhost.localdomain (8.11.3/8.11.3) id g3ALkki01405 for lojban@yahoogroups.com; Thu, 11 Apr 2002 00:46:46 +0300 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" To: lojban list Subject: Re: [lojban] [davidbrin@cts.com: Re: lojban story.] Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 00:46:44 +0300 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.2] References: <20020405182833.GB15975@digitalkingdom.org> <09e301c1e0ae$844db120$e5b7003e@oemcomputer> In-Reply-To: <09e301c1e0ae$844db120$e5b7003e@oemcomputer> MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: <02041100464402.01189@localhost.localdomain> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit From: Robin Turner Reply-To: robin@bilkent.edu.tr X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=810606 X-Yahoo-Profile: digambaranath X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 13966 On Wednesday 10 April 2002 19:40, Adam Raizen wrote: > la deivid. brin. cusku di'e > > > Oh... you should note that the translated "Toujours Voir" took up 388 > > words > > > in lojban when the original took 250 in English. So the mother tongue is > > still efficient! > > No one ever advertised Lojban as a compression algorithm. Lojban makes > explicit many grammatical and lexical distinctions which are left implicit > in English, so it's not surprising that Lojban tends to have more words > than English. A lot of extra words are itty-bitty cmavo which don't add much to the real length (conversely, translating English into Turkish results in fewer words, but some of them can be very long!). Another point is that Lojban _can_ make distinctions explicit, and we tend to make it do so because we can, but it doesn't need to do so - sometimes Lojban can be amazingly terse. robin.tr