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[lojban] Re: Loglan
On Mercredi, déce 4, 2002, at 21:47 US/Eastern, Robert LeChevalier wrote: 


At 05:48 PM 12/4/02 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
For some reason not known to me, Lojban adopted an extra constraint with 
the rafsi: no more than one CVV, one CCV, and one CVC.  Loglan allows
up to 3 rafsi, but there can be more than one of a given form.
For example, felda (Lojban farlu) has rafsi fel, fed, fea.

Lojbab, do you remember why this changed?


It made the assignment job easier, as well as the job of learning the
rafsi: if you know there can only be one CVC, then if you know one, then there are no more. This was (I thought, and whoever I consulted agreed) 
better at addressing arguments that the rafsi system was difficult to
learn. The cost is the occasional hyphen that might be required by one CVC 
that could have been eliminated by having a second one.  Given that we
could not eliminate more than a small fraction of such hyphens (I think it 
was under 5% and probably more like 1% of the set of hypothetical lujvo
used for tuning), easier learning took precedence.
We decided long ago that learning rafsi by themselves was not particularly useful. Many are never used. We found learning rafsi by learning lujvo containing them was far more effective. Since all are also in the on-line dictionary, finding the gismo for an unfamiliar rafsi was only a matter of seconds since any serious reading and writing 
was usually done with the dictionary and parser open and available.



In the 1994 retuning of rafsi assignments, we went even further,
eliminating some CVVs when there was a CCV and vice versa.

(BTW, Thanks to Bob McIvor for speaking up.  I don't have anything to
comment on his messages, but feel it far better when Bob speaks for TLI
interests rather than me.)

lojbab

--
lojbab                                             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: http://www.lojban.org 



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