Re: Efficiency/Spatial Compactness

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@...>