Re: Dublex (was: Washing-machine words (was: Futurese, Chinese,

Jeffrey:
> And Rosta <a-rosta@...> comunu:
>
> > How does the Dublex programme go about doing this? For example, are there
> > different candidate sets of 400? -- E.g. you might start with 1000 and
> > choose the 400 best. Or you might start with no upper number, but take
> > words from English and replace them by compounds, recursively replacing
> > the constituents of compounds by further compounds, until you end up
> > with 400 'atomic' morphemes. And how is the usefulness of a word
> > measured?
>
> Good questions!  Basically, I first developed the 400-root word list by
> studying the Universal Language Dictionary (the most comprehensive short
> wordlist around, IMO), the Lojban gismu, Basic English and Esperanto.  I
> added a few words that I wanted to make sure were included so that I could
> describe the language in the language (e.g., 'nomin' and 'verb' for "noun"
> and "verb").  The initial 400 was my *subjective* take on the 400 roots that
> would be most productive.
>
> While I have locked in the idea of using 400 roots,* I want the morpheme
> list to evolve and improve over time.  So I apply the concept of survival of
> the fittest to the 400 morphemes.  The weakest morphemes of the herd can be
> killed off by new stronger  morphemes.  The strength of a morpheme equals
> the number of two-compound words that can be formed from it.  The strongest
> compound would form 399 words with it as the modifying morpheme and 399
> words with it as the base morpheme for a strength of 798.  In practice the
> current average root has a strength of 24 right now, meaning each root forms
> 24 two-word compounds (but the median strength is 14).
O a very good answer! So long as one can be bothered, these evolutionary
methods are surely the best.

BTW, I would say your theoretical maximum number of combos is 800, not
798. E.g. big-big might mean "gigantic".

--And.

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