Re: Learning a language

From: Rex F. May (rex.may_at_comcast.net)
Date: 06/25/04 

Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2004 15:14:13 GMT

in article m3vfhgf34r.fsf@mika.informatik.uni-freiburg.de, LEE Sau Dan at
danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de wrote on 6/25/04 2:33 AM:

>>>>>> "Dmitri" == Dmitri <uiesperanto@aol.com> writes:
>
>>> Hm. 20 words. so... A tad under 1% of cegli is Indonesian.
>>> Probably would be more if I had a better dictionary.
>>>
> Dmitri> Well, of course I was using M-I as an example........and
> Dmitri> if the detractor is a Basque or Burushaski or an Ainu
> Dmitri> (yeah, yeah, I know....)..........you see what I
> Dmitri> mean....there will always be SOMEBODY gonna to be pissed
> Dmitri> off that you didn't make Ceqli more like HIS language.
>
> If the distribution of origins of words in Ceqli reflects roughly the
> distribution of speaker counts, then I'd say it's fair.
>
> Esperanto is thus unfair. It's heavily biased.

Ceqli is biased in favor of languages that have a lot of words that fit the
nCnV word-shape formula. This seems to be a bias towards Mandarin (tho
borrowing is somewhat minimized by the comparative lack of possible
syllables in Mandarin, and the fact that the phonemic tone can't be imported
into ceqli), English, Hindi, Spanish, French, and a relative bias against
consonant-laden Slavic languages and the 3-consonant root system of the
Afro-Asiatic languages. And, since the general way I find vocab is to look
first at Mandarin, then English, then Hindi, then Spanish, etc., in order of
number of speakers, it is somewhat biased in favor of the large languages.
However, the bias is a side effect, not a policy.

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