[no subject]

[u7911005@cc.nctu.edu.tw]

> Both versions can be translated to English "of", but that is not the
> "meaning" of either, just the closest English colloquial
> approximation.

I see.

> Not quite that frame of mind.  We used several English synonyms and let the
> computer decide which one matched up with phonemes from other languages
> best.  In this case, you are correct that "view" was the word chosen, but
> that may or may not have been because of similarity with European language
> words.  We tried "see" as well.

Did you also choose from synonyms in the same way for other languages?
(esp. Chinese)

> But I have heard that "brown" is not a color commonly used in Chinese.
> I can't remember the word I obtained from the dictionary, but the result
> was "bunre".  This may be a little less recognizable, especially if the
> Chinese root we used is not well-known.

Well, the choice doesn't really matter much, except the similarity-with-
other-languages issue.  There two synonyms for "brown" in Chinese are
"tzun" (literally, brown) and "kafe" (literally, coffee color).  Most
Native Chinese know *both* of the synonyms since age 8 or so.  Either
are well-known, but "kafe" is more often used, especially in informal
text/speech.  (Of course, there are also other cases in which some of
the synonyms are more well-known than others.  And obviously, not every
concept translate to a simple Chinese phrase.)

When I use the Lojban/Chinese resemblance to help memorize the Lojban
vocabulary, I *first* try to identify the Chinese part of the selbri,
*then* it acts like a mnemonic.

> Also the algorithm might give a strange result because the word I got in
> Chinese was a digraph, and the word making algorithm might have taken part
> of each component resulting in something with no real recognition at all.

The same reason also causes languages with generally shorter words (like
Chinese) to be more prominent in Lojban words.

> I don't know any examples of this off hand, but I have the old Loglan
> dictionary in front of me.  For the concept regular/cyclical/periodic,
> Dr. Brown used the Chinese "i lyu" by some Romanization, taking the "il"
> to score as part of "rilri".  The Lojban word for the concept is "diknu",
> by the way, and I know that the English component in the "ik" from
> "cyclical".  Dr. Brown's word for "powerful" is "lilpa" from Chinese
> "li liang".  The Lojban word is "vlipa".  Dr. Brown's word for "screw/bolt"
> is "skori" from Chinese "lo so ding"; the Lojban word is "klupe" where I
> do not know any of the etymology.  In the latter case, the Chinese
> contribution appears to be the s and 2 vowels.  There are probably comparable
> Lojban examples.

The learnability-score word-making method does have its limits.  Every
language places its own importance on different parts of pronunciation,
so what's acceptable as a simple misspelling of one word in one language
might be regarded as a big difference in another language.  And when
these differences are merged together in the word-making process, there
will always be problems.  But generally this method does help in learning
the vocabulary, and choosing better synonyms for one concept certainly
helped in recognizing the "similar parts" in the words.