On Sat, Mar 02, 2013 at 12:07:07AM -0700, Jonathan Jones wrote: > On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 11:42 PM, la gleki <gleki.is.my.name@gmail.com>wrote: > > On Saturday, March 2, 2013 10:18:07 AM UTC+4, aionys wrote: > > > >> On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 11:03 PM, spitaki <create...@gmail.com> wrote: > >>> But that's so ambiguous, and the friggen point of lojban is to do away > >>> with ambiguity in every way! > >>> > >> > >> No it isn't. The point is to remove /syntactic/ ambiguity, not /semantic/. > >> ba'e remove syntactic ambiguity and ba'e reduce semantic ambiguity by choosing different words for different things (unlike 'bank', 'fly', 'date', etc. in NatLangs) > > Can't lojban remove or increase semantic ambiguity too? > > Of course it can. That's what verbosity- or the lack thereof- is for. But > that's not a uniquely Lojbanic thing. It's true of all languages. In > general, semantic ambiguity is inversely proportional to verbosity. > That statement makes much more sense if you replace ambiguity by vagueness. Ambiguity either is or isn't, depending on whether or not more than one distinct class of circumstances is described by the sentence. Vagueness is about the (non-)precision of the class described and decreases with the amount of words you use to describe these circumstances. But ok, of course the distinction between both words always depends on your definition of 'distinct classes', which is vague in itself. v4hn
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