stevo

On Fri,= Jul 6, 2012 at 4:45 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com> w= rote:

John E Clifford, On 03/07/2012 17:36:

& has been missing a while, so his ideas are not in the current files. = They were iirc mainly technical and philosophic, so not (as) relevant to st= ructural questions. (I hope this remark is inaccurate enough to get & t= o 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 was wondering. It seems to me that you rarely contribute
anything to the community, and when you do, it is usually to
criticize, to point 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. From 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 assuming 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 something it
seems you not only do not care about, but apparently actively
dislike, especially given your recent comment about being unable to
keep a straight face in discussing Lojban.

I have for decades (more than two, not quite three, so far -- i.e. all my a= dult life) been very interested in the idea of there existing a certain sor= t of loglang and of this loglang being available to the world for use. I th= ink it would be a boon for the world to have recourse to an ergonomically u= sable unambiguous language. Not everybody interested in Loglan--Lojban is i= nterested in any sort of loglang, but it does seem as though quite a few pe= ople involved in Loglan--Lojban have been interested in a loglang, and also= as though many of those interested in loglangs, especially ones with a com= munity of sponsors, gravitate towards Loglan--Lojban.

I define a loglang as one that can unambiguously encode any explicit predic= ate logic formula in a way that is no less concise than the way natlangs wo= uld express the formula (with much greater ambiguity and leaving much more = to be glorked from context). The relevance of the concision requirement is = firstly that without it, the gain in clarity is not necessarily worth the e= ffort of greater verbosity; rather, the goal is to up the clarity-to-verbos= ity ratio. And secondly, designing a language that can unambiguously encode= any explicit predicate logic formula is trivially easy; it's only the conc= ision requirement that makes the challenge difficult (or maybe impossible).= Not everybody defines their sought-for loglang by these criteria. For exam= ple, John Clifford and Martin Bays are very preoccupied with having a highl= y specified semantics for the loglang, which is something I'm rather unsymp= athetic to.

Considered *as a loglang (in my definition of that term)*, Lojban is a comp= lete failure, though it must be borne in mind that it wasn't fundamentally = designed to be a loglang; the loglang aspect is more part of its (undeserve= d) reputation than its essence. (I should clarify that, once the BPFK does = its work, which basically involves Robin wielding the political muscle and = Xorxes wielding the intellectual muscle, Lojban would succeed in being logi= cally unambiguous. The failure is to meet the (never aimed-for) criterion o= f concision.) (I should also note that Lojban has been a success relative t= o the goals of the founders of Lojban, namely to create a public-domain sta= ble "finished" version of Loglan around which a community of users can grow= .)

I'm here (on this list) partly because I've been 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 marginalized) belonging. But also I'm here bec= ause I think there's a chance of a genuine loglang coupled with a community= of sponsors emerging from the Loglan--Lojban community. There might come a= time when enough folk that think as I do 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. F= or example, discard rafsi, make all gismu CCV -- becomes conciser and easie= r to learn in one go. Or discard almost all selmaho, default to Polish nota= tion syntax, and you have something much conciser, much more easy to learn,= much more easy to parse. I suppose that even these changes are so drastic = that they'd amount to discarding the current Loglan--Lojban entirely and st= arting over, but I think a complete redesign is anyway necessary because of= the one fundamental design challenge of a loglang, which is the challenge = of representing where two argument-places have the same value (e.g. in "Joh= n laughed and sneezed", where the argument-place of John(), of Laugh() and = of Sneeze() have the same value): specifically, the challenge is to represe= nt that in a concise and human-usable way (bearing in mind that a normal se= ntence might involve dozens of groups of argument-places that have the same= value). You c
ould call this loglang "LoCCan3", but, unlike John Clifford's vision, it co= uldn't be achieved by incremental revisions to LoCCan2.

--And.

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