Terseness (Re: New to Lojban)

[Matthew Faupel <matthew@CPD.NTC.NOKIA.COM>]

BO: 2) Lojban seems to be a rather terse language (I like that!).  Do you
BO: have any idea how many syllables it takes to translate an English
BO: passage of say 100 syllables into lojban?  Far prefer lojban to
BO: Esperanto, which seems to me very verbose and exhausting for even the
BO: simplest utterances.

BL: Actually, I don't think Lojban is particularly terse, for a couple of
BL: reasons (I got a couple of reasons for everything %^)

[lojbab then proceeds to give various reasons for why Lojban isn't terse,
all of which I basically agree with].

However, I'd like to point out that there is one feature of Lojban which can
lead to terseness, namely the use of an observational style of writing.
This was quite forcibly underlined for me a few months ago when Colin Fine
posted an alternative haiku to one I posted previously:

    co'u solgu'i
    i zi murse  i solji
    rirxe le lalxu

Brevity is achieved by use of bare selbri and attitudinals, a technique that
is perfectly valid in Lojban but which sounds somewhat odd in English.

Lojban's lack of meaningful monosyllables (most are just structure words)
does rather cut down on the ability to be brief though...


Matthew