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[lojban] Re: emotions



At 12:28 PM 5/24/03 -0400, Pierre Abbat wrote:
On Saturday 24 May 2003 11:22, Jordan DeLong wrote:
> I think this all rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of lojban
> word classes.  People like to think about gismu, cmavo and lujvo.
> But it's actually brivla, cmavo and cmene.  Gismu, lujvo and fu'ivla
> are just different types of brivla; none are more privledged than
> the others.

Not true. Some fu'ivla have rafsi (proposed); all gismu except {brod(i,o,u)}
have rafsi; some gismu have short rafsi. So {malgaci zei smani} cannot be
shortened, but {glauka zei cnebo} can be shortened to {glaukyne'o}, and
{xamgu zei zmadu} can be shortened to {xagmau}.

Why is it important that infrequently used jargon words have very short forms?

It was part of the Loglan design strategy that infrequently used words would tend to be longer than frequently used words, based on Zipf's Law.

lojbab

--
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:                 http://www.lojban.org