Notes on Oravia's vocabulary system

I created this page because many people have been asking how Oravia differs from previous attempts at oligosynthetic or taxonomic languages.

Important differences of Oravia's vocabulary with other approaches

Previous languages trying a sound-syllable associations (or olygossyntatic) were generally interested in reflecting some kind of organizational or taxonomic truth. Oravia is no such thing, instead these associations are meant for mnemonics, to help people learn, deduce, and remember words (and many other advantages I talk about below).
These other approaches were based on a creator's own intuitions of what things go together or how to combine meanings to form words. This resulted in rather arbitrary combinations or clusters. Oravia on the other hand has a unique empirical approach; I did not make up the clusters, rather, they were discovered through word embeddings.
These other approaches had words that were too similar. For example, bofo- = colors, then bofoc = red and bofof = yellow. this is a big issue: words were confusable in memory and they were hard to distinguish in speech. Oravia on the other hand has words that may share the first syllable but are otherwise quite distinct from each other and avoid being one sound change away, as well as avoiding confusable pairs like l/r, m/n, etc.

Furthermore

1) The closest analogy to Oravia's vocabulary is compounds in English (like "housework", "houseplant"), because they share first syllable and are composed of meaningful units. The research on perception of compounds is supportive that people process the units as meaningful and it does not make it more confusable.

2) It's entirely fine in most situations for people to drop the beginning of the words (that are shared) and use roots. In fact Oravia was built with this in mind, you can move the components around, you can change word clusters, you can create new words. First one learn the structure of the language, then they can play with it. I think this point is underappreciated because I think constructed languages should be expressive and fun, and there is so much you can do with Oravia (that you cannot do in any other language) to think and express yourself in ways you never knew possible, to use different styles, personalizations and creativity.

3) In line with English compounds as above, words are not arbitrary sounds. The syllables have meanings, and once you associate the meanings, it's not as easy to confuse.

4) It comes with a lot of other advantages, like:

a) With just knowing the 48 noun classes/clusters, you may be able to have a gist of what is going on.
b) It helps when you want to go up an abstraction level, or you forgot how to say something (maybe you just remember an associated word, maybe you just remember the beginning of the word, maybe you just remember how to say the category. In every one of these cases, you'd know the subcluster and can communicate).
c) It makes learning vocabulary more interesting.
d) With time, learning new words gets easier and easier.
e) It allows for less words to be memorized because for example the word "dog" has "animal" in it, it's not a separate word.
f) You don't need separate words to create register, you can use the same word components to vary formality.
g) You can essentially learn a lot of the vocabulary just by knowing the 259 building blocks.
h) It's much easier to scan a text for information or to parse sentences. For example, a li word is telling you when something happened, a no word is a function word like already, almost, and so on.

5) The syllables in large part have a natural language analog that further reinforces learning and memory. For example, vi means internal body and the language analog is Latin viscera.

In sum, Oravia's vocabulary approach is quite different from these other languages, it avoids issues present in previous attempts and it has many other advantages.