[lojban-beginners] Re: A few lojban questions...

[Arnt Richard Johansen <arj@nvg.org>]

On Sun, Dec 07, 2008 at 03:46:24AM -0700, jknilinux@gmail.com wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm new, so, well, I have a few questions related to lojban...
> 
> 1: According to Alfred Tarski's definition, is lojban semantically closed?

I hadn't heard of that concept before, but if Wikipedia's description is accurate, then Lojban is:

"a language in which it is possible for one sentence to predicate truth (or falsehood) of another sentence in the same language (or even of itself)"

This is trivially easy with sentences like "na go'i" ("not the-previous-utterance", the usual way of responding "no"), or "la'e dei jitfa" ("the referent of this sentence is false").

> 2: Is there a predicate-logic-oriented introduction to lojban, or at least
> something that shows exactly how predicate logic is related to lojban?
> I haven't looked at it too much but, for example, where are the quantifiers?

Not as far as I know. You may want to look at the Complete Lojban Language, or the draft version thereof: http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=The+Lojban+Reference+Grammar

> 3: Why not use ZFC set theory as a basis for language instead?

I would be surprised if that even occurred to the language designers. Does ZFC have a semantics, or an interface for attaching one?

> 4: Finally, is there a one-to-one correlation between letters and sounds,
> and between spelling and words, and between words and sound? For example,
> are there two letters that sound the same, like k and c in english, or two
> words that sound the same or spell the same, like can and can or fish and
> phish?

No. Yes. No. No. No.

There is a one-to-many correspondence from letters to sounds. However, the sets of sounds that each letter maps to is non-overlapping, so that if you hear a sound, you will always (in theory) know which letter it represents.

An overview of the mapping is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban_grammar#Phonology (I'm linking to Wikipedia, because none of the online versions of the CLL get the phonetic symbols right.)

There are no homonyms in Lojban.

-- 
Arnt Richard Johansen                                http://arj.nvg.org/
Clientside scripting has its place.  Its place happens to be somewhere in
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