Re: Efficiency/Spatial Compactness

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.