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

From: Robert LeChevalier <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 07 Dec 2002 13:43:55 -0500

At 11:05 AM 12/7/02 +0000, And Rosta wrote:
>As you may have noticed, English doesn't
>have self-segmentation, yet you converse in it without problems with
>determining word boundaries.

I'm a native speaker. But people seem to have trouble learning 
English. And my limitations in learning Russian have been in part one of 
picking words out. Generally for me to understand Russian, I have to 
identify one or two common words in the speech stream and resolve from 
there. If there are no familiar words in the speech stream, I cannot 
resolve Russian into words. Fluent Spanish I cannot resolve at all even if 
I do occasionally recognize a word going by.

>As I said in messages of yesterday, I strongly suspect that with
>spoken Lojban, as with natural languages, we rely mainly on pragmatics
>rather than phonology to disambiguate word-boundaries. I acknowledge
>that I have had almost nil experience of hearing spoken Lojban
>while you have had a lot, so I may be wrong.

It should be easy to test. Have the random sentence generator generate 
something long and random but in theory grammatical. Get someone to read 
it fluently at varying speeds (a text-to-speech generator would be best to 
prevent speaker cuing of word boundaries, and see if it can be resolved by 
a listener.

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