Re: lojban newbie: an outsider looking in

["Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <lojbab@lojban.org>]

At 07:24 PM 10/31/99 -0500, Michal Wallace (sabren) wrote:
>From: "Michal Wallace (sabren)" <sabren@manifestation.com>
>On Wed, 27 Oct 1999, Jorge Llambias wrote:
>
> > >There is some kind of magical trick
> > >to this process that ensures that no two lojban words are ever the same.
> >
> > Not magical, but admittedly a little more complicated
> > than it need have been.
>
>Having read a bit more... I think it makes a lot of sense..
>I'm still not clear whether all gismu have the same patterns for
>their rafsi or not. Given a gismu you've never seen, should you
>be able to tell the rafsi?

Not precisely.  You will know the set of all possible rafsi that could be 
used.  You know that no rafsi is used for more than one gismu, but that we 
try to use all rafsi for something if it is plausible that they stand for 
something.  You also know that no gismu has more than one of each of the 
three possible forms CVC CVV and CCV.  Given these rules, the more rafsi 
you know definitively, the more likely you will be sure what the rafsi are 
for a gismu you newly study.

Example:  klama  has the possible rafsi determined by its word form of
kam, lam, ka'a, la'a, and kla.  No others are possible.  If you know 
already that kam is the rafsi for cmavo ka, ka'a the rafsi for katna, la'a 
for lasna, and lam for lamji, then you know that klama could only have 
kla.  It turns out that there are 6 other words that could have been 
assigned "kla", but klama is clearly the most frequent of these (and has no 
other short rafsi) so it gets the rafsi.

This logic sounds a little convoluted for a single gismu, but you find that 
after you know maybe 20% of the rafsi, you seem to be able to guess with 
80-90% accuracy what the rafsi will be for a given gismu.

lojbab
----
lojbab                     ***NOTE NEW ADDRESS***           lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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