[lojban-beginners] anti-Zipfian gismu rant

[turnip <turnip@bcpl.net>]

Compare these pair of sentences:

Old Italian squirrels are stupid, but zebras are smart.
loi tolci'o natmritaliano bo ritcyratcu cu tolmencre .iki'u xirmrxipotigre cu 
mencre.

The Algerian gymnast's cassava is 10^-18 cubits long.
le le jerxo zajba ku samcu cu xatsi gutci.

  Note the difference in length between the two sentences and their English 
counterpart.  In the first, all the non-cmavo words are non-gismu, whereas in 
the second, all the non-cmavo words are gismu.  The first sentence is almost 
twice as long as the English, whereas in the scond, it is about 20% shorter. 
The English sentences are roughly the same length. The relative frequency of 
the "important" English words in the British National Corpus (appearance per 
million words)* are:

old 524.86 Italian 47.91 squirrel 2.28 stupid 30.89 zebra 2.22 smart 17.32, 
average =105.913

Algerian 2.18 gymnast 0.19  cassava 0.41  atto- 0.25 cubit 0.09
Average=0.624

  So how come we have short words (gismu) for the latter set, but very long 
words for the former set?

(* No attempts have been made to corect for singular vs. plural, etc.  This is 
for single POV purposes only :-)

   (On a side note, my kids have a raccoon puppet, which my brother likes to 
put on and say, "I'm Italian.  Yay!" in a silly voice, knowing that it makes 
me laugh uncorntoallably because of lojban's lack of gismu for Italian or 
raccoon :-)

                 --gejyspa