Recognizability

["61510::GILSON" <cbmvax!uunet!pucc.princeton.edu!gilson!61510.decnet>]

One of the ways we discuss the attributes of conlangs is recognizability. (I
know that recognizability may not be a major factor to everyone, but it is to
me and to a lot of others; in fact, to advocates of Interlingua, it is prob-
ably _the_ major criterion.) It sometimes troubles me that we have no good way
of analyzing recognizability other that to give someone a bunch of text in a
language without any instruction in the language and see how much of it can
be understood.

James C. Brown, the inventor of Loglan, used a formula which had the advantage
of mathematical preciseness; however, insofar as it considers the recogniza-
bility for speakers of a given language, it seems to me to be fatally flawed.
For one thing, it does not take into account the fact that the consonants, I
believe, count for more than the vowels; for another, I am quite certain that
disconnected parts should be counted for less than connected. Thus, for example,
JCB's figure of 2/7 for Russian "galuboi" in "blanu" (in the original Sci.
Amer. article) is probably a great overestimate of the amount by which "blanu"
reminds a Russian speaker of "galuboi." I would count close to zero there. To
the extent that Lojban keeps JCB's formula, it suffers from the same defects.

Another question is the fact that in English and French, at least, spelling
may count more than pronunciation for recognizability. Suppose we were
constructing a loglan (in the generic sense) in which only English was to
be used in generating a recognizability score. For the word "nation," using
pronunciation alone, probably the best word would be "necno" or something
close to it (the final vowel would be arbitrary). But I guarantee that more
_literate_ English speakers would recognize "natno" (again, with the vari-
ation of the final vowel permitted). If we do not confine ourselves to a
Loglan type of CCVCV/CVCCV structure, Interlingua's "natione" is just about
ideal in recognizability, though in pronunciation only the two n's would
count in a pronunciation-based recognizability score.

To me, at least, this is a vital question to be faced by a language con-
structor; therefore, I would be interested in seeing all comments on this. For
that reason, I am sending this to both the lojban list and the conlang list.
My apologies if this means you get two copies (I will!) because you're on both.

                                                  Bruce