From lojban+bncCIywt_XDCRD7mZjpBBoEXZFSKw@googlegroups.com Thu Jan 06 10:42:19 2011 Received: from mail-yi0-f61.google.com ([209.85.218.61]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.72) (envelope-from ) id 1Paumt-0005px-6W; Thu, 06 Jan 2011 10:42:19 -0800 Received: by yia27 with SMTP id 27sf10338766yia.16 for ; Thu, 06 Jan 2011 10:42:09 -0800 (PST) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=googlegroups.com; s=beta; h=domainkey-signature:received:x-beenthere:received:received:received :received:received-spf:received:message-id:x-ymail-osg:received :x-mailer:references:date:from:subject:to:in-reply-to:mime-version :x-original-sender:x-original-authentication-results:reply-to :precedence:mailing-list:list-id:list-post:list-help:list-archive :sender:list-subscribe:list-unsubscribe:content-type; bh=OHA1DtS9H7+80U9tQbBW6NzuARYHi/BlY9ywN7Ay9Dw=; b=MjOHP6pm1C9+F05hOQDt4dKitVPLcv34HP2QuIoDnfGGOUpAsJzr50gKb6Z+SNVrR3 cST0Uqwxv85xuWpHl99LDPfTjx8XlaMcK2kJb7gHE0b6Z6aaOJllqIcDavS2kVJgUE2p neFBCsPV7NaJ3g5N0ppZePj88rr+S8JlR1vvw= DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=googlegroups.com; s=beta; h=x-beenthere:received-spf:message-id:x-ymail-osg:x-mailer:references :date:from:subject:to:in-reply-to:mime-version:x-original-sender :x-original-authentication-results:reply-to:precedence:mailing-list :list-id:list-post:list-help:list-archive:sender:list-subscribe :list-unsubscribe:content-type; b=ep9CcSe++gUZ4t5fS7BrAIBY7A2atkUroW05kwev1r0wH8Ul9szIrokVXXtiUGLiRg ARZGMENU06PlIBiVEaG3yS4Vffa3upcn1SsgT39Bsg6iWcKzi+1FSS0/IYQ4VlZ1duIb j8/tOZVQBM1GBtYfKfYDVF/0Oq5vlcG8Ut7Bg= Received: by 10.151.115.19 with SMTP id s19mr1744443ybm.26.1294339323982; Thu, 06 Jan 2011 10:42:03 -0800 (PST) X-BeenThere: lojban@googlegroups.com Received: by 10.151.33.32 with SMTP id l32ls9476807ybj.2.p; Thu, 06 Jan 2011 10:42:03 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.236.110.10 with SMTP id t10mr2919281yhg.9.1294339322178; Thu, 06 Jan 2011 10:42:02 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.236.110.10 with SMTP id t10mr2919279yhg.9.1294339321429; Thu, 06 Jan 2011 10:42:01 -0800 (PST) Received: from web81301.mail.mud.yahoo.com (web81301.mail.mud.yahoo.com [68.142.199.117]) by gmr-mx.google.com with SMTP id i10si2522973yhd.8.2011.01.06.10.42.00; Thu, 06 Jan 2011 10:42:00 -0800 (PST) Received-SPF: pass (google.com: best guess record for domain of kali9putra@yahoo.com designates 68.142.199.117 as permitted sender) client-ip=68.142.199.117; Received: (qmail 79101 invoked by uid 60001); 6 Jan 2011 18:42:00 -0000 Message-ID: <931644.77513.qm@web81301.mail.mud.yahoo.com> X-YMail-OSG: rIVd.BgVM1kdWojHOwDU5xM0z2VoCtvvgpficZgerUbM_p0 rCivVH15nl5d2qig9aFXpNHlMF9_FIFRieXtPoA4f0O1PVWgp1yyo7OLsHVw t5L6jIzR7be984RnmD9m4a3TLvqKPNT6f5I9oJgRTzxm2_gmrLhJ6ATZKXD0 Wzht2ZUlR2QiFFZqzVupnfO97AUrHo9k1OpK6b.LJpwZcVkfrn71y6_HrRC2 QYORoFbe_oqiogZWokAOexnEodn5_zj9HGUsRLkvzL58S5SWtm4nJnrdfxzi UFHKd38nW9Eub1jQNfIJvJg6rMbCwjGmOL8spN8bkVv6lEk0299_3Fb3Vte7 We4gxNl44LlQpflq_PGR2XrxauK6NLZ_LpZGCeesh1JZbXeBE3Qo5xkigbkt hRszkZGm21fMU Received: from [99.92.110.13] by web81301.mail.mud.yahoo.com via HTTP; Thu, 06 Jan 2011 10:41:59 PST X-Mailer: YahooMailRC/553 YahooMailWebService/0.8.107.285259 References: <9114501.161.1294150198377.JavaMail.geo-discussion-forums@yqhy19> <7c0687a1-deba-495a-9760-95d1d0649423@t8g2000prh.googlegroups.com> <20110105165231.GK17534@digitalkingdom.org> <4D25F32F.8000209@gmail.com> Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2011 10:41:59 -0800 (PST) From: John E Clifford Subject: Re: Lojban is *NOT* broken! Stop saying that! (was Re: [lojban] Re: Vote for the Future Global Language) To: lojban@googlegroups.com In-Reply-To: <4D25F32F.8000209@gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Original-Sender: kali9putra@yahoo.com X-Original-Authentication-Results: gmr-mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: best guess record for domain of kali9putra@yahoo.com designates 68.142.199.117 as permitted sender) smtp.mail=kali9putra@yahoo.com; dkim=pass (test mode) header.i=@yahoo.com Reply-To: lojban@googlegroups.com Precedence: list Mailing-list: list lojban@googlegroups.com; contact lojban+owners@googlegroups.com List-ID: List-Post: , List-Help: , List-Archive: Sender: lojban@googlegroups.com List-Subscribe: , List-Unsubscribe: , Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 ----- Original Message ---- From: And Rosta To: lojban@googlegroups.com Sent: Thu, January 6, 2011 10:51:59 AM Subject: Re: Lojban is *NOT* broken! Stop saying that! (was Re: [lojban] Re: Vote for the Future Global Language) Robin Lee Powell, On 05/01/2011 16:52: > Lojban is *FAR* more fully defined than Esperanto. Natural languages are defined by what their speakers know (or do). An invented language may be defined either (A) explicitly, by means of formal grammars and suchlike, or (B), like a natural language, by what their speakers know (or do). Esperanto is defined only (B)-wise. There are some Lojbanists, such as Lojbab, who would prefer a (B)-wise definition for Lojban too, but I guess most folk attracted to the idea of a logical language would want an (A)-wise definition for it. **but, so far as we can tell and act upon, A and B are the same here, that is, people do conform to the formal grammar. And will continue to do so for some time. > No, really: it is. Esperanto doesn't have a formal grammar of any > kind, for starters. But nor does Lojban. Lojban's so-called formal grammar does nothing but define a set of structures of phonological strings. What a real grammar would do is define a set of correspondences between sentence forms and sentence meanings. However, even though Lojban has no true formal grammar, I think it would be easier to write one for Lojban than for almost any other language that has a speech community, though one expects it would be hard for the community to accept it as definitional. **Are we quibbling here about the difference between syntax and grammar? There is a use of "grammar" that is all-encompassing, from phonology through pragmatics, and Lojban certainly doesn't have that, though it lacks only the last two chunks, But, since these have resisted formulation in Linguistics so far, even at the theoretical level, it seems unfair to criticize Lojaban for lacking what Logic and Linguistics have yet to provide good models -- or even criteria -- for. Efforts along this line tend to involve and idealized representational language, almost all of which end up looking a lot like first order predicate logic, meaning that the crucial step in the process from Lojban form to meaning would be -- with a few caveats -- a snap. The only interesting question about Lojban's A syntax is whether all and only semantically significant substructures are also syntactic substructures. This was certainly not true in earlier versions, but I can't read modern syntax well enough to know whether it is now or not (I seem to recall that bridi tail was a particular problem in this respect). > We know far more about how Lojban grammatical structures work than > *any other actually spoken language on the planet*. This is one of the attractions of explicit,(A)-wise definitions. But of all actually spoken languages on the planet, Lojban is the only one that has an explicit, (A)-wise definition, so Lojban wins this competition by having no competitors. ** Being unique in this way can hardly be a flaw in the language, especially if your aim (or your ultimate criterion) is the cionstruction of a complete pragmatics). > We have already won that prize: Lojban is the most precisely, > formally specified language that there is, for any language with its > number of speakers or higher. Period. I challenge anyone to find > anything even *remotely close* to the CLL in terms of covering every > *possible* grammatical combination. Even if you can find such a > thing, the formal grammar takes it so far ahead of everything else > they can't possibly hope to catch up. The virtues of Lojban are indeed as you say they are, for any language with its number of speakers or higher. But this is pf course far more of a tribute to Lojban's success in acquiring a user community than to its formal specification. > The truth of the matter is that you really > *can* say anything you want in Lojban; LNC and alis prove that > pretty conclusively, I think. This is debatable in a number of ways. First, the formal specification doesn't explicitly cover everything ordinary language might require (cf. problems with "if", with alternatival questions, etc.). Second, the claim could be true in only the trivial sense that the basics of predicate structure are sufficient to express all needed meanings; i.e. you can ignore everything but predicate structure and define new predicates to express whatever meaning you need. Third, some of the conventions that have arisen in usage to express needed meanings are not compositional, so their status as licit Lojban is questionable. ** I need to be reminded of what "compositional" means here and see some examples of problem cases. The problems with "if" and the milk-or-cream joke are real enough but clearly don't need solutions outside the existing syntax, only a better use of what is already there (stiop thinking of them as connectives being one useful approach). > 4. Nobody shouts "Wow this is well specified!!!" at the top of > their lungs, but they certainly shout their complaints. Geeks have > a shared culture that compliments are private and insults are > public; it's deeply fucked up. See > http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/ The impressive thing is the vitality of the user community, and the amount of labour folk have invested in it, not the specification. It would be easy -- with the benefit of experience -- to improve on the specification enormously, i.e. easy to design a language better in every conceivable way. But it would be nigh-on impossible to achieve a lojban-scale user-community for it. > I can say anything I need to say in Lojban, modulo my own vocabulary > knowledge. It may well be that for any meaning you want to express, you have a way of expressing it and find that others will understand you. This is not the same thing, though, as it being possible to take your sentences apart and show *how* they mean what you think they do. If you have cooperative interlocutors, you can speak a very broken mangled version of language X and still be understood. Indeed, when all interlocutors know the language only very imperfectly, they may simply be oblivious to all the mistakes. And it can happen that some mistakes are so frequent that in actual usage they override the formal specification (e.g. prexorlo gadri). ** Check. Do the semantic and syntactic substructures congrue? > This puts it ahead of 99.999% of conlangs. But maybe not ahead of 99.999% of conlangs that somebody is at all likely to claim are adequate to all ordinary communicative requirements. > Saying that > it is very far from being complete and functioning is ridiculous, > and pretty insulting to a lot of people's hard work. Whoever is insulted by that misunderstands what people's hard work has achieved. The design of the language itself has little intrinsic excellence (when viewed ahistorically), and it is naive to deny that it is massively incomplete. The achievement has been in building and sustaining the user-community, so that of all languages with a user-community, Lojban is the one that comes closest to being an explicitly specified logical language. The language itself could not have been substantially improved without great detriment to the user-community. **But, of course, a large portion of that community came to Lojban precisely because of the claim to be unambiguous in one fairly major way. Without that claim, the group would be significantly smaller, nearer, say, toki pona (maybe 50 with a little fudging and an awareness base pf a few hundred). --And. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group. To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group. To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.