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Date: Wed, 16 May 2012 15:07:53 -0400
From: "Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG" <lojbab@lojban.org>
Organization: The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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Subject: Re: [lojban] What can you do with Lojban that you can't do with English?
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Alex Private wrote:
> I'm trying to find some info on what the features of Lojban are, so
> far I've only found very few confusing and vague statements about the
> language.
> 
> Could someone tell me what Lojban can do that English cannot and show
> an example so it's easy for me to understand?

Here are a few things.

Lojban avoids syntactic ambiguity.  The classic example from English:

"Time flies like an arrow."
"Fruit flies like a banana."

"Time flies like an arrow".
"With a stopwatch?"

Another English example is "pretty little girl's school".  Is the school 
pretty, or do only pretty girls attend the school.  Is the school pretty 
little, or are the girls pretty little, or are the girls little while 
the school is pretty.  Lojbanic analysis comes up with well over a dozen 
different interpretations of that 4 word phrase using fixed definitions 
of the words, all uniquely expressed in Lojban.

Another buzzword phrase is "audiovisual isomorphism" where the Lojban 
spoken form can be written exactly as it is pronounced, and will be 
spelled correctly and break down into words in the correct way.  Lojban 
has no
"I scream"
"Ice cream"
pairs.  There are also no homonyms.

(Lojban does not eliminate semantic ambiguity, however.  Just as in 
English, words have a range of meanings, somewhat imprecise.  A 
politician can use the Lojban equivalent of words like "conservative" or 
"liberal" to mean all sorts of mutually incompatible things. BUT Lojban 
explicitly marks a word as pejorative with the prefix "mal", and the 
word is NOT to be understood as pejorative without that marker.  Lojban 
also easily allows compounding so that subtle distinctions can be made 
by choosing a more precise word.  Lojban also eliminates the grosser 
kinds of multiple meanings, like the word "pretty" that usually means 
something quite different modifying "little" and modifying "girl".)


A third area:  Lojban clearly separates the metalinguistic, attitudinal, 
emotive part of language from the actual claims.

English relies on things like tone of voice for some of this.  A 
sentence and a question may differ in meaning merely based on how your 
voice rises, or how you express emphasis or quotation:

"This is a problem."
"This is a problem?"
"THIS is a problem!"

(Lojban explicitly marks questions and emphasis with words.  You can 
speak Lojban in a monotone without losing meaning.)

He said I went to the store.
He said "I went to the store."

(The difference between these is minimal in spoken English, though one 
is a quote and the other is not, and they differ in who the person 
claimed went to the store.  Lojban marks quotation in words, and allows 
for unambigous pronouns.)

Lojban emotives/attitudinals convey all the nuances English speakers 
convey in tone of voice, and some that English speakers cannot really 
convey.

"do klama"
(You came.")
appended with any number of attitudinals conveys a variety of reactions
"ui" (happiness)
"ua" (surprise)
"oi" (complaint)
"i'o" (appreciation)
"o'onai" (anger)
"iu" (love)
and these can be combined to express a range of emotions at once.

or subtler but important nuances
"uiro'a" (social happiness - "your presence makes the party more 
interesting"
"uiro'e" (mental happiness - "I'm looking forward to stimulating 
conversation")
"uiro'u" (sexual happiness - which English speakers rarely express in 
words, and when they do so, it is idiosyncratic to the relationship and 
the situation).

Lojban recognizes and clearly expresses the distinction between events 
causing other events, and people being agents of causation, and objects 
being tools of causation.  The classic example here is,
"Guns don't kill people; people kill people" both of which ignore that 
"Guns beings fired (possibly accidentally) while pointing at a critical 
part of the human anatomy, while loaded, and with the safety off" is 
what kills people, or even "Projectiles propelled sufficiently strongly 
to produce traumatic damage to a human body" is what kills people.  Both 
of the latter express event causation, and are expressed differently in 
Lojban from the forms used for guns or people killing people.

Much of the differences in Lojban are of the sort conveyed by the latter 
example, where English allows or even encourages sloppy thinking either 
through its structure or through the linguistic habits of its 
not-very-logical speakers.  Lojban doesn't prevent sloppy thinking or 
usage, but it allows for more precise expression, and both the language 
and the culture of the language speakers encourages more precise and 
clear expression.

-- 
Bob LeChevalier    lojbab@lojban.org    www.lojban.org
President and Founder, The Logical Language Group, Inc.

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