Talk:gismu differing in one letter only
This page (indeed this topic) reminds us of how little redundancy there is in Lojban (the cmavo region is meven worse, of course — everything differs from others by just one letter). So the basic Lojban rules is "Don't make typos, don't talk in a noisy environment." With over 110,000 unused gismu forms, it would seem we could have done better for the gismus (and, for cmavo) we could have tried at least to reduce confusions in the same environment — rather than actively promoting it as we did: setting series of words like {da, de, di} which have the same function and are a muddle in a noisy room — not to mention on a typewriter). The excuse is, of course, that that is what the data from the basic languages gave us but, aside the question of whether the word construction procedure actually gives words easier to learn than random forms, the choice of which words to take from the various languages for concepts in a given area could have been controlled with an eye to eventual differentiation. Still, there is nothing to be done about this at this point, but it is a flaw and one to keep in mind for LoCCan III.