From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Sun Sep 07 19:30:13 2008 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-list); Sun, 07 Sep 2008 19:30:13 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1KcWW4-0006bQ-Vy for lojban-list-real@lojban.org; Sun, 07 Sep 2008 19:30:13 -0700 Received: from narnia.blumen-schwarz.de ([80.190.195.21]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1KcWVz-0006Zn-Nt for lojban-list@lojban.org; Sun, 07 Sep 2008 19:30:12 -0700 Received: from o0656.o.pppool.de ([89.51.6.86] helo=nicte.localnet) by narnia.blumen-schwarz.de with esmtpsa (TLS-1.0:DHE_RSA_AES_256_CBC_SHA1:32) (Exim 4.68) (envelope-from ) id 1KcWVi-0003DK-BX for lojban-list@lojban.org; Mon, 08 Sep 2008 04:29:56 +0200 From: Roman Naumann To: lojban-list@lojban.org Subject: [lojban] Re: How to spread the word Date: Mon, 8 Sep 2008 04:28:39 +0200 User-Agent: KMail/1.10.0 (Linux/2.6.26-1-amd64; KDE/4.1.0; x86_64; ; ) References: <1220648242.3538.15.camel@tulcod-desky> <737b61f30809051604w686071aetec61ac634dcc16dc@mail.gmail.com> <1220815078.3602.37.camel@tulcod-desky> In-Reply-To: <1220815078.3602.37.camel@tulcod-desky> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <200809080428.40089.roman_naumann@fastmail.fm> X-Spam_score: -2.3 X-Spam_score_int: -22 X-Spam_bar: -- X-Spam_report: Spam detection software, running on the system "narnia.blumen-schwarz.de", has identified this incoming email as possible spam. The original message has been attached to this so you can view it (if it isn't spam) or label similar future email. If you have any questions, see the administrator of that system for details. Content preview: On Sunday 07 September 2008 21:17:58 Auke Booij wrote: > Good question. To me, the biggest difference lies near the philosophical > and metaphysical field, where people often talk about undefined ideas. > And then they come to strange conclusions. [...] Content analysis details: (-2.3 points, 5.0 required) pts rule name description ---- ---------------------- -------------------------------------------------- -1.8 ALL_TRUSTED Passed through trusted hosts only via SMTP 2.0 BAYES_50 BODY: Bayesian spam probability is 40 to 60% [score: 0.5000] -2.5 AWL AWL: From: address is in the auto white-list X-Spam-Score: 1.2 X-Spam-Score-Int: 12 X-Spam-Bar: + X-archive-position: 14712 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: roman_naumann@fastmail.fm Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-list@lojban.org X-list: lojban-list On Sunday 07 September 2008 21:17:58 Auke Booij wrote: > Good question. To me, the biggest difference lies near the philosophical > and metaphysical field, where people often talk about undefined ideas. > And then they come to strange conclusions. This is a very good point in my opinion. During the last few months, I have starting studying various works of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Kant in German, which is my first language. Quite often, I could not be sure how far an 'and' ("und") extends, or how many scopes were terminated by a ','. Maybe sounding trivial, in descriptions of abstract thought constructs, the difference often is very important. Whenever I find such a place, I realize the significance of grammatical unambiguity. If I'm not sure about the structure of a bridi, I can always hand it to the parser. My impression is, that those thinkers often tried to help the reader interpret their works - the way they intended them to be interpreted - by explaining the same thought several times in other wording. 'Just to make sure the reader gets it right.' [Sure, semantically, doing this may be useful in lojban too, but I refer to the case of different wordings so that 'an idea of the thought' helps understanding the scoping by allowing for exclusion] I am confident lojbanic works are innately capable of achieving a higher level of denseness, - given the structure of thought takes the lojbanic features into account. But it's not only 'denseness' as in shortness. Nowadays, I think it can be said to be commonly accepted that good (English) style (educational) is writing in short, simple sentences. In German, it's often even suggested to read the English (educational) books instead of the German ones, as they are less cryptic. Old German (I don't really know about old English or other languages), however, is something very different. Sentences of more than a page are no exception. Complex thoughts are not put into several sentences, but more often than not described as one. I don't dislike that style, it has it's pros and cons: It certainly is harder to read, you have to remember (or rather reread) half a page precisely to understand the other half, but it also is more perfect in being a description of the underlying though. The many-short sentence style feels rather like an introduction into the aspects of the thought to me, being less coherent/dense. The less/large-sentence style profits enormously from Lojban, for grammar is unambiguous. However many sub-sentences there are, you can always pick out one of them and study it in isolation first. However cryptic the negation seems, you can always move it over negation boundaries and see if it's, more clear this way. (Even if you get the thought, moving the negation sometimes so drastically changes the appearance of the thought, that you may have to think it over once more to understand it fully) I wonder what Schopenhauer, who tried to create a system of reason, similar to maths in that statements and thoughts could be proven to be right or wrong, would have said to Lojban, which offers a seamless unification of unambiguous (predicate) logic and human language (capable of describing feelings and properties and putting the world in words). mu'o mi'e nam To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to lojban-list-request@lojban.org with the subject unsubscribe, or go to http://www.lojban.org/lsg2/, or if you're really stuck, send mail to secretary@lojban.org for help.