Re: Most developed conlang

On 4/24/07, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
> Jim Henry writes:
> > rather than the word level.  For instance, in E-o
> > "el-don-ej-o" there are three morpheme boundaries,
> > one perfectly transparent (ej-o), one somewhat
> > transparent (between el-don and -ej), and one
> > almost completely opaque (el-don).  We might
> > assign them transparency (or rather opacity)
> > scores of
> >
> > el-  don -ej -o
> >   0.95, 0.20, 0.0
....
> > or thereabouts.  How would we combine these to
> > get an overall opacity score for the word?
> The total score should of course be the product of those values, since
> from the core pieces, each level of opaqueness influences the
> opaqueness of the whole by its morpheme boundary level.
But multiplying the nonzero values would give a lower opacity
score for "eldonejo" than for "eldoni", when in
fact "eldonejo" is slightly more opaque than "eldoni".
And if we multiply all values then any word that has at least
one perfectly transparent morpheme boundary
would get a perfectly-transparent opacity score of 0!

Maybe it would be better to multiply the
_transparency_ scores rather than _opacity_ scores,

(1 - n_0) * ( 1 - n_1) * (1 - n_2 )....
in this case,
(1 - 0.95) * ( 1 - 0.20 ) * ( 1 - 0 )
= 0.05 * 0.80
= 0.04 (transaprency)

and then subtract that from 1 to get its
opacity score, = 0.96.

> > ... Another complicating factor is that
> > we don't want the presence of both
> > "eldoni" and "eldonejo" in the lexicon to inflate
> > the count too much since the latter builds on
> > the former and is almost transparent if you already
> > know "eldoni". ...
>
> This is more tricky, yes.  In the lexicon an Þrjótrunn, I have an
> operation that cuts off parts of an existing entry for construction of
> a new one.  Maybe that would be feasible?
Can you clarify further?

I think Alex Fink's suggestions were probably
along the right lines, at least vis-a-vis lexicon
counting: count only the outermost branching.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry

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