Subject: Re: [lojban] re: nazycau gerku and najyzme

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 May 2000 05:37:56 -0400

At 11:14 PM 05/10/2000 +0200, Adam Raizen wrote:
>la pycyn cusku di'e
> > Is it time for the occasional worry about the lack of redundancy (= the
> > packedness of some word spaces) in Lojban?
>
>I don't really think that Lojban does lack redundancy. I'm not sure
>what you mean by packedness of word spaces, but I don't think it's
>true if you mean that basically every word is necessary.

I interpret "packedness" as referring to the fact that nearly all possible 
word in Lojban ARE words of some sort, even if their meaning is not always 
well-defined. (Nearly all CVs and CVVs are words, all consonant finals are 
names, a high percentage of words in lujvo-wordform space are valid lujvo 
because nearly all short-rafsi values have meaning, and of course all words 
in fu'ivla space are presumed valid, if not necessarily meaningful.)

Probably he is referring specifically to cmavo, though I myself worry more 
about lujvo.

No, after looking back at the text that inspired this:
><<zo nazyzme cu valsi le nazbi guzme .i zo najyzme cu valsi
>le narju guzme>>

it is redundancy in lujvo space that pc was referring to. But I'll address 
the general redundancy problem anyway.

While not all strings of Lojban words are valid Lojban sentences, the lack 
of features like morphological agreement means that errors in grammar have 
less secondary information to allow correction. Some areas of the grammar 
are very highly packed in that you cannot use cloze techniques to 
accurately predict the word category/part-of-speech of a missing 
word. Thus in, "le _____ broda", the space can be filled by several cmavo 
of several different selma'o, and some of those cmavo are very similar is 
sound/spelling and yet have different meaning and grammatical 
function. Likewise in "mi _____ broda" (a common language textbook 
technique is cloze drills, but I found that when writing the Lojban 
textbook, that such drills were impossible because too seldom could I 
constrain problems to the grammatical features being taught at that point).

Coupled with the fact that no one is expert and fluent in all the cmavo, we 
tend to assume and allow for the possibility of word-choice error and 
accept some ungrammatical utterances; but in Lojban things are tightly 
enough packed that there is fear that the wrong correction might be made.

On top of this, minor changes in the wording can lead to major changes in 
meaning. This is true of all languages to some extent, some seems more 
true of Lojban. Small wording changes that lead to major changes of 
grammar while still being grammatical is even more common.

I myself am taken aback by more than 2 or 3 cmavo in a row, which are not 
written as a compound. I know that such forms can be grammatical, but they 
usually involve cmavo that I am less familiar with and I thus have low 
confidence that I can correct errors in cmavo usage. (In spoken Lojban I 
am noted for being worse than most in my ability to understand Lojban that 
has unusual grammar or minor errors).

> Lojban has
>many words which define grammatical structure unambiguously but
>nevertheless are rarely needed to understand the sentence. Take
>for example words like 'va'o', 'ri'a', etc. These are basically always
>followed by 'le nu', and thus 'le nu' is redundant, except in a strict
>lojban grammatical definition.

That is indeed a case where redundancy may exist, though we have Lojbanists 
that push the boundaries of the language and use non-"le nu" sumti there.

> In addition, if the language really
>does lack necessary redundancy somewhere, it has enough
>machinery that its speakers should have no problem inventing the
>necessary redundancy. For example, I find that I sometimes add
>redundant FA's, especially when talking about the third place of
>'knows/opines/intuits/etc. x2 about x3', maybe because the
>redundancy makes it easier to interpret.

For lujvo, you always have the ability to use long-form, narjyguzme vs 
nazbyguzme, but if we have to do this too much, then short-form lujvo space 
will be shown to be too tightly packed.

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 (newly updated!)