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From: Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>
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Subject: Re: [lojban-beginners] Advantages of Lojban
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On Friday 08 June 2012 18:40:30 Waterd wrote:
> I'm trying to decide if learning Lojban or not. I speak Spanish,
> English and German.
> Something I hate of Current standard languages is the ambiguity of
> concepts or words, as you may know with words like Game, Art,
> Happiness, Love, Problem, Challenge, etc etc.
> For that reason I was adviced to learn about this language, yet I
> don't see it actually helps much in that area. I'm wrong?
> Something I don't like is that it seems longer than English, which is
> one of the things I like from English. Why would that be worth it?
> When I found about this language i was very excited, but after reading
> several chapters on the beginner book, I really fail to see important
> advantages over languages i know, in what regards to remove ambiguity
> of words and concepts.

Vagueness and ambiguity are different, though vagueness can develop into 
ambiguity. For instance, "game" can mean "keinritli", "jivna", or "selkalte". 
In French, the first two are covered by "jeu"; the last is "gibier". North 
Germanic languages distinguish the first two (a game which may or may not 
have a winner, and a game in which one tries to win). One term covering the 
first two concepts is vagueness; one term covering both played games and 
hunted game is ambiguity. But all senses came from a Proto-Germanic word 
meaning vaguely "anything enjoyable that happens when people get together".

It's impossible to remove ambiguity without either increasing the number of 
phonemes, making words closer together in sound, or making them longer. 
Greek, for instance, has three or four words for "love", but none of them is 
a single syllable. (Yes there are single-syllable Greek nouns, though it's an 
inflecting language.)

Lojban features syntactic ambiguity, which is accomplished with the 
terminator, a part of speech not found, as far as I know, outside the 
Loglanic family. Of course, inserting terminators makes sentences longer on 
average. But one can drop sumti when they are obvious from context.

Pierre

-- 
Don't buy a French car in Holland. It may be a citroen.

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