Subject: Re: [lojban] META : Who is everyone (and what are they saying)

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2001 20:01:33 -0400

At 06:36 PM 9/18/01 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
>Lojbab:
>#On one extreme we have Michael Helsem, whose poetic efforts at Lojban set a
>#very non-hardline extreme of usage. But that extreme clearly is NOT
>#driving usage because few users emulate Michael. More of them try to
>#emulate xod, or Jorge, or Nick, who each have their own styles that are
>#more or less logically rigorous. At the other extreme is And, who has not
>#for the most part mirrored Michael by presenting us with a usage that
>#reflects his image of the language.
>
>There are several reasons why I write so little Lojban, but there is one 
>reason
>in particular why I don't try to influence others' usage through my own. This
>reason is that there is no mechanism for abbreviation, for creating more
>concise locutions that do not increase vagueness. There is no 'Zipf valve'
>-- no mechanism for shortening locutions whose length is not appropriately
>proportional to their frequency.

The problem is that Zipfean processes usually only work once we know that 
we will be using an excessively long formulation, and until you use 
something a few times, we don't know what excessively long formulation 
needs to be Zipfed in that we can't see what the repetitive pattern is that 
we are trying to abbreviate. The abbreviations we do have, like soi and 
sei and many of the UI like po'o, we were able to predict from natlang 
patterns, but you are posing new abbreviatable patterns possibly lacking 
parallel in the natural laanguages.

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org