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Re: [lojban] Re: CLL and modern Lojban





2017-11-12 4:58 GMT+03:00 'John E Clifford' via lojban <lojban@googlegroups.com>:
For a more thorough (though slightly out-of-date) version of all this, see The role of Error in the History of Loglans (in 8 parts or so) at pkipo.blogspot.com.

1.  What was the initial screw-up?  FOPL (or HOIL or whatever system you choose) depends upon a clear demarcation of different syntactic types (and the corresponding different semantics).  JCB, from the beginning, scrambled these types: quantifiers (sentence-makers with one variable and one sentence) are terms, conjunctions (sentence-makers with two sentences) are term-makers, modals, tenses and negation (sentence-makers with one sentence) are predicate makers and so on.  How is teh structure that allows a logical system to work to be found in all that muddle?

That's certainly true (although wouldn't a language relexing western logical notation be even harder than lojban to speak? that'd be rather easy to test).
 
 To be sure, in the interest of speakablity, some such changes will have to come about, but they are at the end of a process of derivation, not at the beginning.  Most of the 60 year Logjam construction process has been rying to patch up this gap -- and there is no evidence that it has succeeded -- or is even going in the right direction.  Monoparsing, yes (pretty much), but not evidence of correct monoparsing.

What would constitute correct monoparsing?
 

2. People who talk about SAE languages tend to forget what that term means in Sapir and Whorf.  The characteristic of SAE languages is summed up in literal surface reading of S: NP + VP.   The language consists of names of things embedded in a matrix words for properties and relations and actions.  This contrasts with the”purer” “primitive” language where sentences are just long complex verbs.  S n W circularly inferred that SAE speakers view the world (have a metaphysics)  of isolated things and their properties, relations, and activities, while the Hopi or Menominee or whatever view the world as made up of processes (what verbs refer to).

However, isn't the notion of "process" is SWH-ish by itself? Is some language has processes only and no properties and objects how to even compare from it to other languages?
And if a Western language has all of the three notions then it's easy to invent new words semantically similar but being verbs? Which Lojban did with its {ti badna} = "This thing is bananaing", {mi ninmu} = "I am woman-ning".



 Logjam, in its various forms, is clearly of the former sort, terms and predicates.

Do you mean that some languages (like Wakashan ones) do not have predicates but instead pile morphemes up without dedicated markers showing roles of arguments of predicates (which thus do not exist) in an attempt that the meaning gets along, which of course de facto does?

 
 The fact that every aspect of this distinction is simple hogwash doesn’t matter much, except that it does mean the Logjam was, from day one, useless for testing SWH and was (in SnW’s terms) not culturally neutral.

3.  To be sure, the logical traditions of India and China did not develop a set of extralinguistic symbols to deal with their notions.  However, they did use a rigorously controlled (oh, m,y how hard to get the rules right!) stylized version of the basic language (Sanskrit or Chinese or Tibetan) which could easily -- and has been -- converted to Western-style symbolic systems.  The concerns of these logical traditions (less clearly in China, where the tradition was crushed early on in the Confucian triumph) were the standard ones of logic: validity, entailment, third values and the like. Indian logic is clearly (and Chinese possibly) intensional

JCB dealt with possible worlds too (which is clearly related to intensional logic).
That was in early 90s.


, as opposed to the extensional core of Western logic.  It maybe that a HOIL (the assumed logic underlying languages) can enfold Indian logic without difficulty, but it has not yet done so (I think).  But Logjam, based on FOPL, is clearly not culturally neutral again.

Of course, I assume that reformers are constantly changing how Logjam is to be defined and what its goals and values and property are. So, maybe all the traditional ones are now passe’ But I am still waiting for the new list and wondering how that new list, if markedly different, can still claim to be about a language in the Loglan tradition.

A list of what? New features? Which new features? 


 


On Saturday, November 11, 2017, 5:08:14 PM CST, guskant <gusni.kantu@gmail.com> wrote:




Le samedi 11 novembre 2017 14:57:25 UTC, clifford a écrit :
Lojban’s claim to be based on logic is not significantly different from the similar claim for any language (sentences derived by transformations from underlying semantic representations which are often presented as formulae in some higher order intensional logic).  JCB ditched most of the features of FOPL (the best then available) which gave for precision and most of the last 60 years has been spent trying to get at least some of that back (not yet all by a long shot).  Lojban is just an SAE language that looks a little strange because position in a sentence does not have a fixed meaning but rather depends upon the verb at the center.  End of borrowings from logic (hyperbole, but not much).
The logic on which Lojban is “based” is again a European creation (mainly Anglo-American and German, with a little French and Italian).  It takes no account of the logical traditions of India or China nor of the specialized languages developed there for logic.  So, it is hardly culturally neutral in the sense suggested.  Of course, the need for cultural neutrality was prompted by the thoroughly bogus SWH, so its absence is not very damaging, except to the repeated claims to have it.  



coi la pycyn

Thank you for the historical information about Loglan and Lojban. However, I (and maybe la sykyndyr also) tried to "define" what to be called the current and the future Lojban. That "definition" may be shifted from JCB's or the later creaters' will.

As for my point of view of cultural neutrality, the facts of the ancient India and the ancient China you pointed out cannot negate my theory.

 Some of what are studied in the ancient Indian and the ancient China are now translated as "logic" into English because of the property of studies related to reasoning. However, the subjects of those studies are reasoning, not the symbols of Sanscrit or Hanzi. Those cultures did not invent what can be translated as "symbolic logic", in which a new language consisting of symbols simplified and specialized for expressing logic was invented. 

As I have already discussed, that language invented for European logic are not logic itself. That language, as well as Lojban, should be able to express the ancient Indian logic or the ancient Chinese logic by defining suitably logical axioms and rules of deduction, just like the modern _expression_ of fraction $frac{1}{3}$ can express both European "one over three" and Chinese "san fen zhi yi"; the latter consists of "three", "separation", postposition that means "of", "one".

mi'e la guskant


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