Re: [lojban] Re: se klani be lo kafkylerfu

2014-11-10 0:42 GMT+03:00 TR NS <transfire@gmail.com>:

On Saturday, November 8, 2014 9:31:49 AM UTC-5, la gleki wrote:

2014-11-08 17:15 GMT+03:00 TR NS <tran...@gmail.com>:

On Sunday, November 2, 2014 12:26:12 PM UTC-5, la gleki wrote:
just for the record. some stats.
we take irc logs, only sentences in lojban.
we count the number of words with a given letter multiplied by their frequency divided by the number*frequency of all words. If the same letter occurs more than once in a word we count it as a singular occurrence. We limit ourselves only to the first 3000 most frequent words.

we get:
[x] - found in 2.7% of all spoken in IRC logs words
['] - 16.8%
[c] - 13.9%
[cx'] - 31.75% (at least one of those letters in each word)
[x'] - 19.47% (at least one of those letters in each word)
[cx] followed by a consonant - 2.11%

to'u one of three words contains at least one of the three letters: ['] or [x] or [c].

So what can be done about it? I think it's clear that there are too many "static noise" sounds in the language. And as a logical language there is no reason that it has to rank so low in sound quality (one need only look at online polls to see that Chinese, which has similar qualities, never ranks well).

What? Impossible. Mandarin has two levels of fighting statis noise: tones and the rest part of the sound system that to some degree overlap.

Hmm... I don't mean static as in "hard to understand" I just mean the nature of the sound which doesn't rank high as an aesthetically pleasant sound. Chinese consistently ranks in the top of worst sounding language polls.

Okay, I thought you were talking about signal to noise ratio.

As for Chinese being aesthetically not pleasing then this was certainly a biased poll. Then why would >1 billion of speakers of various dialects still use it? Why won't they start speaking let's say English instead? :D

And what if I tell you that I find it aesthetically pleasing?

But back to Lojban the solution can be to make /^CiV/ and /^CuV/ cmavo a new alternative sounding preserving the existing sounding. Also if a /V'V/ dipthong is forbidden then it's allowed to pronounce it as /VV/. This will lead to the following options in pronouncing words:

{ku'i} => {kui}/{ku'i} (choose the pronunciation that you like).

{o'e} => {oe}/{o'e} (choose the pronunciation that you like).

However,

{i'e} => {i'e} (since /ie/ is an allowed dipthong

I tried counting how many ' can be removed this way. Now I get 7.8% of all words. Thus 16.8 - 7.8 = 9. However, I could miss some words.

I don't know if 9% of words with ' would be fine to you.

Another advantage of such approach is that 7.8% of words can now be pronounced shorter.

Also many ' are found in lujvo. If '-less rafsi are dispreferred then the number of ' will be decreased even more. There is nothing wrong in saying {selprami} instead of {selpa'i} unless someone uses the latter as a nickname.

As for [x] it covers only 2.7% of all words. This letter can probably be eliminated from gismu by replacing with {k}, short rafsi with {x} can be eliminated at all and the corpus can be corrected since it can have mistakes of another kind anyway. E.g. {xrula} can get an alternative pronunciation of e.g. {flora}.

If such alternative make people happier then why not use it?

However, notice that 0.9% of all words is {xu}. The word {xamgu} is No. 86 in the frequency list.

i xu la'edi'u xamgu da'i do