Re: [lojban] Tangent: Is there a better grammar?

[Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>]

On Wed, Apr 07, 2010 at 09:42:12AM +0100, Michael Everson wrote:
> On 7 Apr 2010, at 08:35, GFBeresford@gmail.com wrote:
> 
> > Does anyone know if lojban texts have statistically more/less
> > syllables than their english/natural language equivalents? I
> > suppose to be truly fair, those stats might need to include
> > texts composed in lojban and then translated into english as
> > well...
> 
> Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: 
> 
> Lojban (raw text taken from PDF, table of contents removed, no punctuation)
> 31,727 words
> 112,238 characters (no spaces)
> 144,018 characters (with spaces)
> 
> English (table of contents removed, normal punctuation)
> 26,519 words
> 115,922 characters (no spaces)
> 141,867 characters (with spaces)
> 
> Irish (table of contents removed, normal punctuation)
> 30,498 words
> 132,311 characters (no spaces)
> 162,173 characters (with spaces)
> 
> I leave it for the numerate to determine whether this data is of
> any use in terms of the question.

IME, Lojban is noticeably more verbose (in terms of syllable) than
English, and less so than Formal Japanese.  Lojban and Japanese
handle this problem in the same way: by saying less, and leaving
things to context.

Shoulson and I have argued that a native Lojbanist would have UI as
75+% of their utterances.  :)

-Robin

-- 
They say:  "The first AIs will be built by the military as weapons."
And I'm  thinking:  "Does it even occur to you to try for something
other  than  the default  outcome?"  See http://shrunklink.com/cdiz
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/

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