[lojban] Re: How many possible gismu?

["H. Felton" <fagricipni@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 7:12 PM, <MorphemeAddict@wmconnect.com> wrote:
> In a message dated 8/24/2009 19:02:46 Eastern Daylight Time,
> fagricipni@gmail.com writes:
>
>
>  What I am imagining is a future
> where Lojban has a large base of users, and on rare occasions a
> concept is found to be so commonly used and so important that it
> would unreasonable to deny it a gismu.
>
>
> This is precisely what lujvo and fu'ivla are for.  New gismu would be useful
> for brand-new *fundamental* concepts.  That's not likely to happen very
> often.
>
> stevo

I agree that even at the rate at which I am imagining new gismu to be
created -- which may be ridiculously high -- there would be no actual
problem in this regard for millennia.  However, even though I can write
a program to implementing the brute force algorithm that I have been
able to come up with to answer my second question -- What is the
_smallest_ number of gismu that could fill gismu space, starting
from an empty gismu space? -- the program would based on my initial
guess be O(n!); I don't expect that the program would finish in my
lifetime.  The first question -- What is the _smallest_ number
of new gismu that could fill up gismu space? -- might not be
answerable except by the brute-force approach; but there has got to
be a better way to answer the second -- What is the _smallest_
number of gismu that could fill gismu space, starting from an empty
gismu space? -- I've just not thought of it.  Consider that question
as a mathematical puzzle question with the rules for Lojban being the
set-up for the question; one doesn't have to consider what inspired
me to ask the question; I mentioned because I thought the notion of
what inspired me to ask that question would be interesting, _not_
because I thought that it had any real _practical_ applications --
Mathematicians look for higher and higher pairs of amicable numbers
(http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amicable_numbers) but as far as
I know it is not for practical applications of them.

Also, is a coincidence that your name "stevo" has the morphological
form of a gismu, but does not show up in even the "experimental gismu"
on the Lojban dictionary web search
(http://www.lojban.org/cgi-bin/dict.pl?Form=dict.pl1&Query=
   &Strategy=*&Database=jbo->en&submit=Submit+query), as "gumri" does.
I personally will not use "la gumri" or the "la marca" that I remember
seeing discussed a long time ago on a different message forum.
"la marca" could be considered taking liberties with the morphology,
so if you are using "la stevo" in the same way, you can hardly
criticze me for my imagination since I'm just personally curious
about the mathematical answer to my question, and don't intend to
actually propose new gismu.


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