Hey &,= long time no see, etc. Well, we are less far apart than a casual reading m= ight suggest. I did recall (incorrectly, obviously) that you were int= o tight semantics as well, but the rest fits in nicely with the problem set= from of old. Wrapped up, as I am professionally, in variables, I ten= d to see the same-argument problem as just a matter of assigning variables = at the right time and place, but that over looks the fact that variables ar= e an essentially inefficient (for purposes other than precision, at least) = way of doing things. As a result, I tend to see the major problems as= RHE and un/packing. To be sure, for strict concision (syllable= counts, say), vocabulary is a problem, since the shortest legitimate Lojba= n content words are already as long as the average English ones. But going to CCV, for example, raises other problems which, while not stri= ctly relevant to the formal adequacy of the language as a loglang, cut into= its practical applications sharply. The RHE and un/packing problems = go together, because, even if there is a successful parsing program for Loj= ban, it is not at all clear that the isolated elements will be identical or= determinately mapped to the logical elements. From the point of view= of a loglang, they are also a problem for it is with them that the greates= t amount of apparent parsley comes up. While RHE markers can be dropp= ed with wild abandon, some cannot --- and every one that is not a step away= from concision (and back. alas, toward the the state in actual predicate l= ogic, which puts EVERYTHING in, one way or another). So, in one sense= , the first step toward a good loglang is to improve FOL++ in the concision= direction, toward combinatorics, say (not that that always is either concise nor clear).

I do think there can be = incremental improvements within Lojban toward a viable spoken FOL, guarante= ed accurate, and not so prolix as to be unusable (people do use German afte= r all, when English is available -- and Chinese).

From:<= /b> And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Friday, July 6, 2012 3:45 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Is there = any demand for LoCCan3?

John E Clifford, On 03/07/2012 17:36:
> & has been missing a whil= e, so his ideas are not in the current files. They were iirc mainly technic= al and philosophic, so not (as) relevant to structural questions. (I hope t= his remark is inaccurate enough to get & to reenter the lists.)

= Okay. So I'll address Gleki's question about "Is there any demand for LoCCa= n3", and also this, because Jonathan could equally well have asked the same= question of me:
Jonathan Jones, On 01/07/2012 22:59:
> John, I wa= s wondering. It seems to me that you rarely contribute
> anything to = the community, and when you do, it is usually to
> criticize, to poin= t out what you perceive to be flaws in Lojban. You
> also frequently = express your opinion as to the need for a LoCCan3, as
> you put it. F= rom my experience, it seems that you don't like Lojban.
>
> Now= , I may be wrong about all of this, and I wouldn't be surprised if
> you contribute(d) a great deal that I'm unaware of. But assumin= g the
> above is true, and these are your feelings, why are you hear?= I am
> truly curious to know why you maintain a presence in somethin= g it
> seems you not only do not care about, but apparently actively<= br>> dislike, especially given your recent comment about being unable to=
> keep a straight face in discussing Lojban.

I have for decad= es (more than two, not quite three, so far -- i.e. all my adult life) been = very interested in the idea of there existing a certain sort of loglang and= of this loglang being available to the world for use. I think it would be = a boon for the world to have recourse to an ergonomically usable unambiguou= s language. Not everybody interested in Loglan--Lojban is interested in any= sort of loglang, but it does seem as though quite a few people involved in= Loglan--Lojban have been interested in a loglang, and also as though many of those interested in loglangs, especially ones with a commun= ity of sponsors, gravitate towards Loglan--Lojban.

I define a loglan= g as one that can unambiguously encode any explicit predicate logic formula= in a way that is no less concise than the way natlangs would express the f= ormula (with much greater ambiguity and leaving much more to be glorked fro= m context). The relevance of the concision requirement is firstly that with= out it, the gain in clarity is not necessarily worth the effort of greater = verbosity; rather, the goal is to up the clarity-to-verbosity ratio. And se= condly, designing a language that can unambiguously encode any explicit pre= dicate logic formula is trivially easy; it's only the concision requirement= that makes the challenge difficult (or maybe impossible). Not everybody de= fines their sought-for loglang by these criteria. For example, John Cliffor= d and Martin Bays are very preoccupied with having a highly specified semantics for the loglang, which is something I'm rather unsympa= thetic to.

Considered *as a loglang (in my definition of that term)*= , Lojban is a complete failure, though it must be borne in mind that it was= n't fundamentally designed to be a loglang; the loglang aspect is more part= of its (undeserved) reputation than its essence. (I should clarify that, o= nce the BPFK does its work, which basically involves Robin wielding the pol= itical muscle and Xorxes wielding the intellectual muscle, Lojban would suc= ceed in being logically unambiguous. The failure is to meet the (never aime= d-for) criterion of concision.) (I should also note that Lojban has been a = success relative to the goals of the founders of Lojban, namely to create a= public-domain stable "finished" version of Loglan around which a community= of users can grow.)

I'm here (on this list) partly because I've bee= n part of the community for over 20 years, and at certain times have been the most active participant, so I feel a sense of (always marginalize= d) belonging. But also I'm here because I think there's a chance of a genui= ne loglang coupled with a community of sponsors emerging from the Loglan--L= ojban community. There might come a time when enough folk that think as I d= o have gravitated hither that some sort of critical mass is formed and work= on an ergonomically usable loglang is begun.

It's easy to think of = ways of drastically improving on the Lojban design. For example, discard ra= fsi, make all gismu CCV -- becomes conciser and easier to learn in one go. = Or discard almost all selmaho, default to Polish notation syntax, and you h= ave something much conciser, much more easy to learn, much more easy to par= se. I suppose that even these changes are so drastic that they'd amount to = discarding the current Loglan--Lojban entirely and starting over, but I thi= nk a complete redesign is anyway necessary because of the one fundamental design challenge of a loglang, which is the challenge of repre= senting where two argument-places have the same value (e.g. in "John laughe= d and sneezed", where the argument-place of John(), of Laugh() and of Sneez= e() have the same value): specifically, the challenge is to represent that = in a concise and human-usable way (bearing in mind that a normal sentence m= ight involve dozens of groups of argument-places that have the same value).= You c
ould call this loglang "LoCCan3", but, unlike John Clifford's vis= ion, it couldn't be achieved by incremental revisions to LoCCan2.

--= And.

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