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Re: [lojban] do jbopre speak slowly?
On 6/29/06, Chris Capel <pdf23ds@gmail.com> wrote:
Lojban seems to pack more information into individual phonemes than do
languges like English. (Compare the number and frequency of one
syllable words in the two languages.)
In Lojban, there are only 190 one syllable words, out of 20,000 or more
possible syllables. I suspect in English the ratio of monosyllables to
possible syllables must be higher than that puny 1%.
What is true is that in Lojban they are all concentrated in CV and CVV
forms, since syllables of the form CCV, CCCV, CCVV, CCCVV, CVC, etc
are not words.
The same happens with words of more than one syllable. For example
the shape CCVCCV is extremely densely packed, almost any possible
word of that shape will be a more or less meaningful word, but then the
neighbouring CCVCCCVV shape is practically empty, containing at most
some odd fu'ivla.
In English, words are probably not so concentrated in some particular
syllable combinations, but I'm not sure if total words over total possible
syllable combinations is more dense in Lojban than in English.
Thus, it seems like speaking
Lojban at the same speed and (lack of) clarity as one speaks English
would probably make it difficult to understand the Lojban. So, in
order to keep communication errors down, does this suggest that Lojban
speakers would naturally, probably unconciously, learn to speak
phonemes more slowly and clearly than do English speakers?
Since Lojban words tend to have more syllables than English words,
and there are less syllables available in Lojban (so less possibility
for confusion) I suspect that syllables will tend to be pronounced faster
in fluent Lojban than in fluent English.
Now, even if this were the case, it probably wouldn't *sound* like it,
because the rate of Shannon-information transfer would probably be
about the same, and that's probably what determines how "fast" speech
sounds to a fluent listener. But measured in phonemes/sec, it would be
slower.
My impression is that in phonemes/sec Lojban will be faster, but I don't
think we can do more than guess at this point.
mu'o mi'e xorxes