On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 09:34:47AM -0400, Kris Maglione wrote: > On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 02:03:31PM +0100, Ethan Grammatikidis wrote: > > > >On 17 Jun 2010, at 11:15, Kris Maglione wrote: > > > >>On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 11:59:25AM +0200, pancake wrote: > >>>When i said toki pona..i was not joking.. > >>> > >>> http://en.tokipona.org/ > >>> > >>>you can index the dictionary with a byte. > >> > >>It might be alright as a pidgin, but as someone with pronounced > >>logophilia, I'd tend find it insufferable. Beyond that, it by > >>nature requires that things which can be said in other > >>languages in one word. This does recommend it to technical > >>writing. > > > >I'd say I have a little logophillia myself, but I'd rather learn > >how to combine few short words than memorise numerous long ones. > >In fact it rather parallels how I'd rather use rc than bourne > >shell, plan 9 than posix. > > I might also add that it would be as aply named if Pona translated > as New. I'm not necessarily averse to a properly designed > language[1]; one of Tolkein's might perhaps do nicely. But Toki Pona > isn't it. > > [1] Though, in practice, they tend not to catch. Our brains evolved > to process languages that grew organically, and they tend to work in > ideosyncratic ways that we can't really put rules to. And, when we > come to situations that the language doesn't handle well, we tend to > improvise without much consideration, so the languages tend to shift > regardless. Pidgens, used for long enough, turn into creoles without > exception. > > -- > Kris Maglione > > I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all > my love is toward individuals. > --Jonathan Swift > >
Why to speculate when we already know the answer? >From Wikipedia: In the field of data compression, Shannon–Fano coding is a technique for constructing a prefix code based on a set of symbols and their probabilities (estimated or measured). It is suboptimal in the sense that it does not achieve the lowest possible expected code word length like Huffman coding; however unlike Huffman coding, it does guarantee that all code word lengths are within one bit of their theoretical ideal − logP(x).
