stevo

On Mon, Jul 9, 2012 at 11:55 AM, la gleki <gleki.is.my.name@gmail= .com> wrote:

On Sunday, July 8, 2012 10:32:36 PM UTC+4, And Ro= sta wrote:
la gleki, On 07/07/2012 0= 3:33:
> On Saturday, July 7, 2012 12:45:26 AM UTC+4, And Rosta wrote:
> I define a loglang as one that can unambiguously encode any explic= it
> predicate logic formula in a way that is no less concise than the = way
> natlangs would express the formula (with much greater ambiguity an= d
> leaving much more to be glorked from context). The relevance of th= e
> concision requirement is firstly that without it, the gain in clar= ity
> is not necessarily worth the effort of greater verbosity; rather, = the
> goal is to up the clarity-to-verbosity ratio. And secondly, design= ing
> a language that can unambiguously encode any explicit predicate lo= gic
> formula is trivially easy; it's only the concision requirement= that
> makes the challenge difficult (or maybe impossible). Not everybody
> defines their sought-for loglang by these criteria. For example, J= ohn
> Clifford and Martin Bays are very preoccupied with having a highly
> specified semantics for the loglang, which is something I'm ra= ther
> unsympathetic to.
>
> Just several hours ago I posted a short note
> <https://www.facebook.= com/photo.php?fbid=3D236029819851609&set=3Da.20005= 0570116201.43269.100003337779349&type=3D1&theater&= ;notif_t=3Dphoto_comment>
> on another critique of Lojban from the side semanticophils.

I've looked at that note, and I think it misunderstands what John Q= is saying. The point in the intro is about how the basic lexicon covers se= mantic space, i.e. how you select your inventory of basic morphemes

It is. It says how you select root words. They al= l appear to be taken from English semantics etc.
, whereas the point in the last chapter pertains to a kind of inventory of = primitives for a metalanguage for defining meanings (i.e. a Wierzickan-type= enterprise).

Indeed, he wanted to rearrange semanti= c space using his new affixes not always having equivalents in most common = languages. But he admits =A0that he fails to do that for everything. I can = see that he has roots for "NECKTIE/CRAVATTE". But if so then whty= criticising Lojban if you have the same?

It's nice that you are creating a new language. But why stretching= the truth about your own child? Ithkuil doesn't resolve such issue and= nobody is likely to make huge progress here.

Still we can argue = about this in theory but practice shows that in most cases Ithkuil affixes = correspond to Lojbanic words (not taking into account that Lojbanic predica= tes have arguments whereas Ithkuil's do not or the meaning of their der= ivatives is postulated which wipes out all charm).

The remaining part of Ithkuil is nevetherless worth studying. He accum= ulated features of many nice conlangs in his project.
So we should be fr= iends with him as well (as will all the other thinkers). I respect John Qui= jada's work very much.

It's not fighting with him. Just defending Lojban.

He's ta= lking about two different things. Incidentally, I disagree with the idea of= a closed-set of primitives, as something philosophically untenable, tho an= open set of primitives is something I'm in favour of.

> It's easy to think of ways of drastically improving on the Loj= ban
> design.
>
> For example, discard rafsi
>
> How would you distinguish between {latcribe} and {mlatu cribe} the= n?
> The latter is definitely not panda.

That question can't really be answered without imagining an alterna= tive morphology. Suppose the parser worked strictly left-to-right with no l= ookahead, and we said that every V is word-final. Then if gismu were CCV, a= form C1-[C2-C3-V] could be used to indicate that it was non-final in a com= pound, the C1 being functionally equivalent to {zei}. But more importantly,= the number of cmavo should be shrunk to the minimum, and the length of cma= vo and gismu should be inversely proportional to their frequency.

> =A0 =A0 , make all gismu CCV -- becomes conciser and easier to lea= rn in one go.
>
> Yes, lowering signal-to-noise ratio even further ;)

Indeed. Concision is far more important than noise-resistance, and it i= s far easier to give a basically concise system an expanded noise-resistant= version than to give a basically verbose noise-resistant system a concise = form.

> =A0 =A0 Or discard almost all selmaho, default to Polish notation = syntax,
>
> Can you provide us with any draft of such language?

It's not really worth the effort, since the feasibility of the syst= em is pretty obvious: ordinary predicate logic is consistent with Polish an= d Reverse Polish notations.I would insist on something that can be parsed i= ncrementally left-to-right with no lookahead, which keeps everything simple= .

> =A0 =A0 and you have something much conciser, much more easy to le= arn, much more easy to parse. I suppose that even these changes are so dras= tic that they'd amount to discarding the current Loglan--Lojban entirel= y and starting over, but I think a complete redesign is anyway necessary be= cause of the one fundamental design challenge of a loglang, which is the ch= allenge of representing where two argument-places have the same value (e.g.= in "John laughed and sneezed", where the argument-place of John(= ), of Laugh() and of Sneeze() have the same value): specifically, the chall= enge is to represent that in a concise and human-usable way (bearing in min= d that a normal sentence might involve dozens of groups of argument-places = that have the same value). You c
> =A0 =A0 ould call this loglang "LoCCan3", but, unlike Jo= hn Clifford's vision, it couldn't be achieved by incremental revisi= ons to LoCCan2.
>
> I can praise any improvements backward compatible with the current= language. But any new loglangs not having a parser just don't exist to= me. They are just projects, not working loglangs.

I don't know what counts as backward-compatibility. Xorxes's pr= oposals probably strike a balance of worthwhileness and backward-compatibil= ity. A "working parser" strikes me as an irrelevance: the parsing= algorithm for an ergonomic loglang should be so simple that its parsabilit= y should be self-evident.

--And.

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