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

[And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com>]

Geoff Beresford:
> 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...

What happens in practice with translation is that the translator throws away some of the information in the original until the translation is approximately comparable to the original in length or surface complexity. And I'm sure it's the case that what people actually say is driven partly by how much effort (in breath or keystrokes) it takes to say it.

I'm at a loss to think of a fair way to compare languages for conciseness. Typically a language has ways of encoding certain stuff very concisely and then expresses the rest not at all or only very cumbersomely. 

--And.


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