Re: [lojban] Re: flashcards?

[Alex Martini <alexjm@umich.edu>]

Chinese (Mandarin) is an interesting creature in this respect. True,  
they have very few phonetic combinations with only a consonant and a  
vowel or few, possibly followed by {n} from which to make words. Then  
there are the 4 tones. But the other part is that there are many  
homonym. The word "yi" pronounced like ee has about 40 different  
meanings between the four tones, if I remember an article I read on  
Braille Pinyin correctly. In written Chinese, this isn't a problem,  
since the different words have different characters. To deal with  
this in speech, word pairs (which my teacher called terms, though  
that may not be a proper name) are used. So, they have a very dense  
system, but they make it less dense to be more easily understood.

The poem "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" shows this; every word  
is pronounced the same with only changing tone. See http:// 
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den .

mu'omi'e .alex.

On Jun 27, 2006, at 8:21 PM, robin wrote:

> Chris Capel wrote:
> > On 6/26/06, Alex Martini <alexjm@umich.edu> wrote:
> > > On Jun 26, 2006, at 1:41 AM, Paul Vigo wrote:
> > > > With
> > > > lojban I think this may be particularly useful as many of the  
> > > gismu
> > > > are complex (place structure variations can make a familiar  
> > > seeming
> > > > word suddenly novel again) and many look pretty much the same
> > > > (cvccv / ccvcv) so are easy to confuse with other gismu when
> > > > unfamiliar.
> > >
> > > On the topic of gismu looking simmilar, how much work would be
> > > involved in making a list of gismu that only differ by vowels? I've
> > > found a few pairs like {ciska} and {cusku} that I repeatedly have to
> > > look up to keep apart, but I'm not sure how many there are total.
> >
> > Are there any natlangs that pack words more tightly into phonetic
> > space than Lojban?
> Chinese?
>
> robin.tr