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Re: [lojban] Re: Are Natlang the best case for entropy in communication ?
Michael Turniansky, On 10/08/2012 14:43:
(and personally, I've always wondered why the CLL makes such a big
deal about the digits being easily told apart in noisy environments
(18.2) when as clearly demonstrated here and in so many other places
(ko'V series, fV series, etc.), it's not the case. Better for the CLL
to not make the claim at all, since it just sets up its own
counterarguments in other area of the language (my personal opinion
when I first read that passage 8 years ago? It was simply a dig at
JCB and Loglan, which uses a different system which is much easier to
memorize for the beginner (cf. tiljan and gleki's arguments about the
matter at hand) )
I don't understand your point. With the exception of re/rei, the digits *are* maximally distinct, and that is a virtue, especially in lexical domains where context is unlikely to be able to disambiguate, such digits and letters. We see in English that _x-ty_ and _x-teen_ words are frequently replaced by _x-zero_ and _one-x_, and that on the telephone the alpha-bravo-charlie-delta system is used for letter names. It's true that other series aren't internally maximally distinct, but partial internal sameness enhances learnability, and the ko'V and fV series at least make use of vocalic contrasts, which are acoustically more salient than consonantal ones (tho for reasons of acoustic distinctness, ko'V would better have been kV'o).
Now, as to Escape's contention that such kind of phonemic ambiguity
in words of potentially disastrous confusion (i.e., opposite words in
the same scale) doesn't exist in natural languages, I WILL challenge
that assertion. <facetiousness> Really? Have you studied all the
scales in all of the world's many thousands of languages? You impress
me! </facetiousness> I haven't found any yet, but I can't dismiss the
possibility it exists in a natlang...
In many accents of American English, _can_ and _can't_ are very similar or even sometimes identical, and it is a known impediment to effective communication.
A slightly different phenomenon is autoantonyms (<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary_of_auto-antonyms>), most of which involve polysemous words with opposite polysemes. Some of these (e.g. apology, sanction) are also not always disambiguable by context and hence are impediments to effective communication.
--And.
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