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Re: Efficiency/Spatial Compactness

From:And Rosta <and.rosta@...>
Date:Saturday, July 21, 2007, 14:34
David G. Durand, On 20/07/2007 16:59:
> 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?
Yes, but it's pretty cumbersome to use them (= the Lojban pro-forms) in an information-lossless way. I guess it's kind of a holygrail to find a system of assigning shortforms in a way that is dynamic, lossless, human-usable, and efficient (in terms of compression achieved). In Livagian I have nothing that comes close to that (except for an unthrilling method of assigning short names to recurring discourse referents), mainly because the holygrail seems to me to be unfindable. --And.