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[lojban] Re: Loglish: A Modest Proposal
Steven Arnold wrote:
Wordnet is a system that attempts to take a set of "core meanings" and
associate those meanings with words from different languages. It is
accessible over the Internet. I invented a language by writing a
program in Python that fetched the list of core meanings and assigned
words to them from a list. It was a very fast route to a 26,000+ word
dictionary. Granted, the dictionary needed a little data grooming --
there were a number of words that, to me, didn't deserve a separate
term. There were also words that I wanted to make sure got shorter
words, since I expected them to be used more often. But I think the
data grooming was by far the minor portion of the task, and by using
Wordnet, I saved probably hundreds of hours of word development
compared to doing it all by hand.
That, combined with using Markov chains for word generation, created an
excellent base language in a very short time. I'd be happy to share
the source code of these tools with anyone who is interested; email me
privately for that.
That is at odds with the way we add new words to Lojban. We make
compounds called "lujvo" from gismu, or we borrow words from other
languages, usually one of the Big Six or biological Latin, though we
have a handful of Tupi words (mandioka, markuja) and one from an
Algonquian language (ckankua). The only exceptions that come to mind are
{tsaparatsa'i}, which is my attempt to imitate the rhythm called
"ratamacue", and {vonpaso}, which has fu'ivla form but is made from
Lojban words. Most of the original gismu were made by putting together
bits and pieces of words from the Big Six using a weighting algorithm.
AFAIK no Lojban word was made by a Markov chain.
phma
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