[no subject]

[u7911005@cc.nctu.edu.tw]

>UC>  Did you also choose from synonyms in the same way for other
>UC> languages?
>UC>  (esp. Chinese)
>
>Yes and no.  Since I am a native English speaker, I have a much broader
>knowledge of my language's vocabulary, and the tolerable limits of memory
>hook than I do for other languages.
> [...]  Chinese and
>Spanish probably had the best representation among non-English, with Russian
>not too far behind, though suffering from misunderstandings of Russian
>morphology and phonetics.

Well, you must be glad that finally there's a (potential) Chinese
Lojbanist. xu mi pamoi jungo lojbo (the first Lojban sentence I've made)

>So, Chinese is particularly well-covered, especially if you are finding
>the synonyms we used relevant.  Probably not as well covered as English,
>but there were probably two synonyms or more for manyif not most Chinese
>contributions.

The coverage is clearly related to the length of the words in each
language.  Most Chinese words are short.  And if a word in a language is
longer than usual, it probably isn't used a lot in that language, which
means that the word *should* not get as much coverage as usual.

>It is nice to know that you have chosen exactly the technique we would
>prefer people to use (identify the language component, then use it as a
>memory hook, rather than trying to go the other way).  Your testimony is
>the most powerful statement for our approach I have had in a long time
>(the recognition score technique has been under almost relentless attack
>by American English speakers who would probably prefer the words to
>be more recognizable.

If you used purely English (or purely Chinese) words to make Lojban
words, it will probably cause (native) English speakers to add some
cultural bias to the meaning of these words.  Perhaps it would be easier
to learn to English speakers (both native & secondary), but I think it's
also important to have non-English-speaking Lojbanists.