Although these don't look much like any particular word in any language, you can see bits of different languages in each of them. For example, prenu has the "per" of English "person" and the ren of Chinese. cukta has the "ook" of English "book", all of Chinese shu(c is pronounced "sh"), and part of Arabic (and Turkish) kitap. vanju is like French vin and Chinese jiu. This makes learning words easier for the largest number of people.I want to physically reach through my monitor and strangle him for writing that. Words in human languages are composed of morphemes, not letters. It's easier to learn words in foreign languages if you know how to dissect a new word into its morphemes so that you can read the meaning of the word.
By getting a five letter statistical average over completely different langauges, the morphemes of the original words will not be preserved, and therefore you cannot look at a lojban root word, dissect it into morphemes, and then read what it means.
"per" and "pre" are two completely different morphemes in english, the root of "book" is not "ook", it's "bo". "vin" and "van" are two completely different morphemes in French, etc, etc. The lojban words are not similar to their real-language roots in the same way that real words are to each other, instead they're similar based on the mathematical distance between letters, which is completely useless for learning it.
You can sort of figure out the above examples after the fact, after you have learnt the words, with the knowledge of what the word is in those eight languages. But given a lojban word you have never seen before, you have no way of knowing what it means, even if you know the word in all those languages.
I want to physically reach through my monitor and strangle him for writing that. Words in human languages are composed of morphemes, not letters. It's easier to learn words in foreign languages if you know how to dissect a new word into its morphemes so that you can read the meaning of the word.
By getting a five letter statistical average over completely different langauges, the morphemes of the original words will not be preserved, and therefore you cannot look at a lojban root word, dissect it into morphemes, and then read what it means.
"per" and "pre" are two completely different morphemes in english, the root of "book" is not "ook", it's "bo". "vin" and "van" are two completely different morphemes in French, etc, etc. The lojban words are not similar to their real-language roots in the same way that real words are to each other, instead they're similar based on the mathematical distance between letters, which is completely useless for learning it.
You can sort of figure out the above examples after the fact, after you have learnt the words, with the knowledge of what the word is in those eight languages. But given a lojban word you have never seen before, you have no way of knowing what it means, even if you know the word in all those languages.