brevity metrics

[And Rosta <arosta@uclan.ac.uk>]

Robin Turner:
#A lot of  extra words are itty-bitty cmavo which don't add much to the real 
#length (conversely, translating English into Turkish results in fewer words, 
#but some of them can be very long!).  Another point is that Lojban _can_ #make distinctions explicit, and we tend to make it do so because we can, 
#but it doesn't need to do so - sometimes Lojban can be amazingly terse. 

A good way of measuring brevity is to compare translations, e.g. by
comparing the Lojban translation of _Alice_ with translations into other
languages, measuring by bytes or pages. If anyone can be bothered
to do this, I'm sure lots of us would be interested in the results.

--And.