Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: cmegadri valfendi preti

From: Robert LeChevalier <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Dec 2002 22:45:28 -0500

At 12:49 AM 12/7/02 +0000, And Rosta wrote:
>I'm not sure that you understood the point I was making. I was claiming
>that the morphological rules are ALREADY too complex to be used in
>real time.

I think you are wrong, provided that we aren't inventing pathological 
borderline cases (like something that sounds like a full Lojban sentence 
ending with a consonant.

Names are seldom so long that they will not be understood to be names 
without any special parsing. Indeed, in my experience, a name included in 
a Lojban utterance makes the whole thing easier to aurally parse.
lujvo also are easy to hear because with longer ones, the penultimate 
stress tends to be emphasized more so as not to be heard as a secondary 
stress. Because lujvo are designed so that the front cannot fall off, only 
a REALLY long lujvo would be difficult to keep track of.

fu'ivla, especially Type IVs, however, are irregular, and thus there are 
few aural patterns that distinguish them. I haven't heard spoken Lojban 
with a lot of fu'ivla in them, but I suspect that with fluent speech they 
will be the hardest to identify.

>It is therefore irrelevant that making the rules even more
>complex will make life even harder for the listener struggling to parse
>in real time. I think the rules could not be simplified to the point
>where they could be used in realtime, unless the entire morphology
>was discarded and redesigned from scratch.

Since real human beings have spoken and understood Lojban is real time 
(though Nick at full bore exceeds my capabilities, it is usually because he 
is using words I don't recall rather than that I can't break his speech 
into words), this sounds like a post-Apollo claim that the moon is really a 
lump of green cheese 20 miles up.

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