Re: Efficiency/Spatial Compactness

In a message dated 7/20/2007 12:04:10 PM Central Daylight Time,
philip.newton@GMAIL.COM writes:


> On 7/20/07, David G. Durand <dgd@...> wrote:
> > Doesn't Lojban have some short words that can be bound on the fly in
> > a conversation?
>
> Yes, it does -- the standard ones for ko'V and fo'V as "pronouns", for
> a total of ten words, and brodV as "pro-verbs" (total of five). Two of
> those "pro-verbs" even have combining forms (rafsi). (Scare quotes
> around "proXYZ" since Lojban word classes don't map 1:1 onto the
> standard noun/verb/etc. classification. If I didn't get things wrong,
> they're more accurately pro-sumti and pro-brivla, respectively.)
>
> It's also not uncommon to bind nouns to letterals, i.e. the names of
> letters of the alphabet (for consonants: the letter followed by schwa
> followed by pause, e.g. ly. for the name of the letter ell), and
> sometimes this is even done implicitly: since nouns are often bound to
> the first letter in the word, using an unassigned letteral will cause
> many people to assume it stands for the last relevant
> object/person/etc. which begins with that letter. (For example, if
> someone introduced me as "la filip.niutyn.", then they might refer to
> my thereafter as "fy.ny.".)
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
>
These may not be the same kinds of words, but Lojban also has
1. utterance pro-sumti:
di'u - 'the previous utterance'
de'u - 'an earlier utterance'
da'u - 'a much earlier utterance'
di'e - 'the next utterance'
de'e - 'a later utterance'
da'e - 'a much later utterance'
dei - 'this very utterance'
do'i - 'some utterance'

2. anaphoric pro-sumti and pro-bridi
ri - (repeats last sumti)
ra - (repeats [a] previous sumti)
ru - (repeats long-ago sumti)

go'i - (repeats last bridi)
go'a - (repeats previous bridi)
go'u - (repeats long-ago bridi)
go'e - (repeats last-but-one bridi)
go'o - (repeats future bridi)
nei - (repeats current bridi)
no'a - (repeats outer bridi)

Other related words are "goi" (pro-sumti assignment), "cei" (pro-bridi
assignment), and "ra'o" (pro-cmavo update).

-- The Complete Logical Language -- by John Cowan, pp.148-152

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