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

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2001 01:32:25 +0100

Lojbab:
> At 12:31 PM 9/20/01 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
> >My sense is that people avoid cumbersome locutions because they are
> >cumbersome, so on the whole you'd only get usage of them if we actually
> >said to the community "In your usage, please don't try too hard to achieve
> >conciseness -- say what you wish to say ignoring its clunkiness, and then
> >in the light of this we will add to the language zipfean shortenings".
>
> Rather, I would expect "there is no way to say this that isn't mildly
> verbose or hopelessly confusing. I want to say it and be understood, so I
> will say it verbosely."

That's what I would expect too. Because -- as natlangs show -- people are
such good glorkers, hopeless confusion will be relatively rare, and hence
verbosity for the sake of precision will also be rare. So my point stands:
unless special efforts are made to encourage precision over concision
for a while, usage will not provide evidence of where zipfing would be
required.

> >Most
> >people quite legitimately care more about stylistic elegance than about
> >precision, and unless the notion is prominent in the culture that for
> >the time being it is a virtuous and necessary phase in the language design
> >process to ignore stylistic considerations pertaining to brevity, we will not
> >get the necessary evidence for where zipfing is required.
>
> Why not? The evidence will not be limited to actual verbose and clunky
> usages, but will also include places where people ellipsized and
> were/weren't understood, as well as experimental cmavo that will have been
> tried to deal with clunkiness.
>
> Stylistic elegance that fails to communicate something is still evidence.

To briefly resummarize my point: concision will always prevail over precision,
given our known aesthetics, laziness, glorking skills and so on. You'll
get extra precision only when it does not lead to loss of concision. And
the degree of precision determines not so much the odds of being correctly
understood but rather the amount of glorking required. The antithesis of
precision is not misunderstanding but rather glorking; for it to be precise,
meaning must be decoded, and glorking is the opposite of decoding.

--And.