From lojbab@xxxxxx.xxxx Mon Jan 3 21:48:53 2000 X-Digest-Num: 328 Message-ID: <44114.328.1782.959273825@eGroups.com> Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2000 00:48:53 -0500 From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" Lojbab: >This was for me an interesting and instructive reply. Glad to oblige. Ah, well then: we agree that a Lojban-subset would be a fairly good solution. >For me, a Lojban-subset is not Lojban, so my point that Lojban is not the >ideal choice holds good. For you, what counts is that this would still >be a major use and application of Lojban, and would contribute to Lojban- >proper reaching critical mass. Good summary of my position. > > As for the gismu forms, as I said: you are reproposing "Anglan" > > and the advantages people see in the idea just don't pan out in actual > > trial. > >I really find it hard to believe that Anglan wouldn't save loads of effort >in learning vocab. It might for English speakers (but then it is often said that English speakers have more trouble using Basic English than non English speakers - i.e. having something that is near-English may cause too much crossover for English natives) But politically it has no advantages over simply learning English - both are anathema to the French (and perhaps others). For non English speakers it is not clear that Anglan words would be easier than learning the standard English words, unless maybe you were stripping away polysemy. But, if you try to strip away the polysemy, then resemblance to English words will counteract your efforts. It is much easier to remember that Lojban has rinka, mukti, and the other causal words dividing up the semantic space of English "cause", than it would be to have words that are suggestive of other English concepts that distract or which resemble "cause" itself. > > If you change the morphology, of course, you lose the > > self-segregating aspects and thus spoken/written interchangeability. > >True. For an ideal loglang, I prefer self-segregating morphology. For any >kind of IAL that actually has to get widely learnt, I think a more >transparently a posteriori lexicon would be preferable. Take a substantial Lojban text and substitute English keywords for the predicates. use a singular nouns and third person verbs - no cheating by reintroducing agreement. You'll probably find that the text isn't readable - it may suggest the general topic of discussion, but the meat will be opaque. Even using your knowledge of the Lojban words will not help that much because of crossover. > > I said human beings. And maybe I should have included "read" a patent > > too. Human beings wrote Principia, but very few human beings can read it > > with any understanding. > >I confess I have no intention of ever trying to read the Principia, so I >don't know how readable it is, or even in what language or notations it >is written in, but I am doubtful that the difficulty lay with the >notation rather than the content. I've been told that it is pages upon pages of notation. That alone is enough to make me unwilling to try. > >By fudgeability, I mean the possibility of being ambiguous when you > > >can't be bothered to disambiguate, or when disambiguation is more > > >trouble than it's worth. > > > > Well then fudgeability is IMPORTANT for legal translation, because there > > are places where lawyers WANT to leave meaning a little ambiguous. > > Ambiguity can allow two sides in disagreement to come to terms, > > leaving the ambiguous areas to be worked out later if necessary. > > You need to be arbitrarily precise in some areas, but Lojban's allowing of > > ambiguity when precision is too much trouble (or agreement is impossible) > > is an advantage. > >Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that with the exception of a few >special cases, every Lojban sentence can unambiguously be translated >into a pure predicate logic counterpart. I don't think Lojban has any >mechanisms for fudging logical meaning. Lojban has all that wonderful sumti-raising, the as-yet unresolved indirect question logic, masses, and tanru, all of which are ways to fudge logical meaning. Of course it is CLEAR that you are fudging, but it is still fudging. > > I think though that you have to learn to reason with predicate > > calculus in order to accurately write in it. You also need to be able > to do > > so with Lojban. In looking at the indirect question discussion that you > > recently conducted, I can imagine identifying and discussing the logical > > problems with everyone's formulations entirely in Lojban. I cannot > > imagine doing so entirely confining ourselves to predicate notation. Maybe > > some logicians can, but not me. > >I suppose that if you insist so strongly I should believe you. Still, I >could write in something that would be both a version of predicate notation >and proper Lojban. Would you predict that you would be unable to understand >that? Maybe yes, but in that case it would be the case that only certain >subsets of Lojban are comprehensible to you. Well I have a mental block against notational symbols, that I seem to get around to some extent with words (except for the lambda calculus stuff, which I am permanently just off the edge of grokking it even using Lojban and English words. > > Well here is where the history comes in. JCB did try to do these things. > > His original Loglan, the 1956 version, "rattled around in people's > > heads" (Cowan quoted this more accurately than I did), (I've never seen a > > copy of the 1956 'book', of which only a couple hundred mimeo copies were > > made), and people couldn't learn or use it effectively. So he started > > adding flesh to the language, developed his peculiar learnability schemes > > (the word making algorithm is something he actually claims to have tested > > on groups of students, unlike most other aspects of the language, though > > again we have no idea what typo of controls he used). > >I've done JCB a partial injustice, then. All the same, this first phase >strikes me as the one that, had it been done thoroughly, would have been >the most instructive. For example, was the problem really one of excessive >simplicity, or was it the cumbersomeness of too few abbreviatory devices, >or was it the fudgeabilitylessness making too many demands on the speaker's >cerebrative powers? He never defined what "rattle around" meant, but I have understood it as a combination of excessive simplicity, lack of detailed definitions, and it being too hard to say even fairly simple languagy things using predicate notation. think about the headaches we have even with the substantiality of Lojban, in dealing with "only", "just" and "even" >I suspect that even though Lojban is defined so that every sentence has >an unambiguous logical meaning, its accommodations of more familiarly >natlang-like forms will allow speakers to communicate in Lojban effectively >without actually mastering its logicality. That is, its logicality is >something that will be circumvented. Hence I predict that speakers' ability >to communicate with each other in Lojban will prove nothing interesting. If it does however lead to higher levels of "logical thinking", say on a standardized test of same, as compared with a control group that spent the same amount of time in a predicate logic course, this would suggest that something worked (we once tried to use such a standardized test, but did not have critical mass to even get the test conducted). Very interesting indeed. This should all be part of a proper documentation >of the Loglan project. Well, it is now, since the list archive is part of said documentation. But I have always wished that JCB would tell the story himself, rather than having to rely on my reconstructions mostly built up while he was hostile. > They might come to be. But at first the patent application will be as an > > interlanguage for translating patents that were originally written in other > > languages. > >This seems relevant only if a translation into Lojban has to preserve >ambiguities in the original. That could be difficult. I think that it does. The patent translator is not supposed to be adding or changing content,and resolving ambiguity is contrary. If a given text is truly ambiguous and not representable in a single Lojban form, (I believe that) responsible legal translation would include the multiple forms and state the ambiguity metalinguistically > > You mentioned using English-like gismu earlier, but that just reduces to > > the problem of translating into legal English. > >The advantage of English-like gismu, in cases where the learners are >anglophones, which is what percent of the EU? > English has ambiguous grossly polysemous words. Legal English has > > conventions to deal with English grammatical ambiguities. Legal Japanese > > has different and incompatible conventions in both words and grammar. To > > write something intelligible to both requires choosing something that > > tackles both sorts of ambiguity. In addition, for the European world, > > English-like means un-sellable to the French. > >My point is nothing more than the one I made earlier -- that for most >IAL purposes, more transparently a posteriori vocab would be better than >what Lojban offers, all things considered. Only if you can get agreement that the words will mean what the English or other words mean in the native language courtroom. Which in turn will take specialized learning. > > Lojban's set selection operators and massifiers are much more flexible than > > logical objects. > >I don't mean to challenge your assertion, but can you spell out more fully >what you mean? > > > (pc established long ago that logical connectives are ineffective for > > truth-tables of 4 or more elements and aren't that great even for 3). > >Does Lojban have logical connectives for truth-tables of more than 2 >elements? No. My solution was the set selectors, which now also serve as converters between masses, sets, and individuals. Whereas you cannot represent all 4 element truth table values using simple logical connectives without repeating elements, you can cover all by saying things like "1 from the the set {a,b} and 1 from the set {c,d}". > > And then there is tense. I've looked at pc's book on tense > > logic. I will never understand it. > >I don't see why tense can't be handled straightforwardly by the existing >apparatus of predicates and quantifiers. I'll leave that to pc to answer. Out of my league. > > >I don't understand. Since we agree that a subset of Lojban is a close > > >approximation of predicate logic notation, surely if a child picks > > >up Lojban, they have picked up predicate logic notation. > > > > No. They have picked up a linguistic manipulation of predicate logic > > notation. I doubt that his daughter could read the notation (if she can > > read at all). We may be getting into an issue over the primacy of speech > > vs. writing here. > >There is a subset of Lojban that is an approximation of a speakable form >of a version of predicate logic notation. There are official rules of >Lojban that can translate any Lojban sentence into such a subset. If you >master Lojban, then you master those rules, and hence you master the >subset, and hence you master a form of predicate logic notation. I am not sure that I buy the "if, then" of the last sentence as necessary to "mastering Lojban". > > I realize and appreciate that. At one time, you were our pet > > iconoclast. Now you write Lojban. > >Not for an awfully long time, I'm afraid. Not enough time (and possibly >not enough enthusiasm). I've started to forget stuff, in fact. So have I, many times. It comes back real quick when you try. A good sign. > > Flexibility in being able to say things at an arbitrary (but variable) > > level of specificity depending on the relative importance of > > precision vs. ambiguity. For example, a patent on exercise equipment (say > > a treadmill) may need to distinguish precisely distinguish between "run" > > and "walk", but a patent on a procedure that involves a person travelling > > on foot does not need to. > >For this kind of flexibility you just need appropriately defined predicates. >But this is not what I meant. Again, your example is one of being able to >say different things. An example of what I mean is the freedom of word >order in Lojban, and its wellknown one-bird-with-many-stonesiness. Hmm that last phrase is exactly the sort of thing I think is not workable with an Anglan. People will see "stonesiness" and choke. >IIRC, this cultural neutrality point arose with regard to the etymologies of >the vocabulary. That is not the only aspect of cultural neutrality that was basic to the Loglan project. > > >Again, I don't see why, but I guess that would be more appropriate for > > >discussion on some generic loglang list. > > > > There isn't any such thing, and I think expanding this could be > > informative (outside the context of multihundred line posts on an unrelated > > thread %^) > >Well, we've re-had the discussion many times about whether to split the list. >All I can do is point out to you how many more people stay subscribed to this >list now that I no longer post very much. %^) lojbab ---- lojbab ***NOTE NEW ADDRESS*** lojbab@lojban.org Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: see Lojban WWW Server: href=" http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban/ " Order _The Complete Lojban Language_ - see our Web pages or ask me.