Re: Efficiency/Spatial Compactness

One way to increase concision is to build dynamic dictionaries of
short forms in the language. Huffman-encoding and LZW use varying
forms of this where certain sequences can be identified for
abbreviation (and the abbreviations later re-used). I don't think
human brains would do very well at this kind of arbitrary anaphora,
but the richer the set of pronouns and other pro-forms, the more
compact utterances can be.

Doesn't Lojban have some short words that can be bound on the fly in
a conversation?

One of the coolest things I ever learned about sign language is that
native speakers often have 5-6 pronouns in stories, because they can
allocate a piece of the spatial field between speakers to a concept
(by making the sign there). Later they refer to that item with a
gesture to the space allocated. So there is some evidence that people
could learn to deal with poly-anaphoric languages.

However, I suspect that spatial memory is much easier for this than
linguistic memory, and that 5 or 6 dynamically recycled pronouns in a
spoken language would quickly become impossible to understand. Our
brain has a lot of hardware to track objects in space (even if
they're not visble all the time) word->meaning mappings seem to be
harder to create and manage.

   -- David

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