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Re: [lojban] lojban ills: implicit emphasis

 
Of course, in the simple example you gave, the capability for different orderings doesn't really yield any cognitive naturalness.  But, to take another textbook example, it's just too annoying to say, in conversation
 
mi vecnu zo'e zo'e le rupnu
 
rather than
 
mi vecnu fo le rupnu
 
(and of course there are much stronger examples too...)
 
Yet, the zo'e mechanism is needed because in some cases it really is more convenient than using the other operators.
 
I really doubt there is any way to make a usable language that doesn't have this sort of redundancy.  Even in the domain of pure mathematical logic, it's well known that requiring a unique normal form for all expressions makes things really nasty --- basically, it means that a lot of things that would be compactly and simply expressed otherwise, are only expressible in a lengthy and unintuitive way, due to the normalization requirement.  (look at a bunch of boolean expressions before and after conversion to conjunctive normal form to see what I mean -- and if you're not a math/cs person, just ignore this whole paragraph ;-)
 
-- Ben G
 
 
 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, March 18, 2005 10:13 AM
Subject: Re: [lojban] lojban ills: implicit emphasis

Hi,
 
So far as I know the creators of Lojban never claimed nor intended it to be ISOMORPHIC to logic.
 
Rather, the goal as I understand it was to make a language that provided the best possible compromise between
 
* logical soundness
* practical usability
 
A language that was simply a verbalizable form of predicate logic would fail the "practical usability" criterion.
 
As Cycorp has found, carefully and correctly encoding an ordinary English sentence in predicate logic takes a trained individual at least 10-15 minutes.  This kind of time-requirement is not viable for a spoken or written language.
 
What is really cool about Lojban, IMO, is that it shows how far one can go in the direction of logicality, without making huge sacrifices in terms of the time required to express commonsensically simple things.
 
Regarding your comment about the existence of different orderings of sentences that are semantically equivalent, I don't think emphasis is the main point here, but rather cognitive naturalness.  If you tried to impose a fixed ordering on all Lojban sentences, I think you'd be making the process of sentence-formulation too cognitively unnatural, which means that speaking and understanding would be made to take a significantly longer time than with the current version of Lojban.  So I view this as an example of the necessary compromise between logical precision and practical usability by human beings.
 
Of course, the Lojbanic system of precision/usability compromises is not the only possible such system, and there may be a better one.  But it is clear to me that over the history of Loglan/Lojban a lot of clever folks have put a lot of thought into "tuning" the Lojbanic system of compromises.  Even if one found another logical-language-structure that was fundamentally better than Lojban, I still suspect it would take a lot of effort to "tune" it into a really workable language (which so far as I can tell, Lojban *just barely* is, in spite of all the work that's gone into it...)
 
 
- Ben Goertzel (also a Lojban novice)
 
----- Original Message -----
From: xah lee
Sent: Friday, March 18, 2005 5:49 AM
Subject: [lojban] lojban ills: implicit emphasis

while studying lojban, i find it less and less of my rather ignorant
original expectations. (however, i still find studying it greatly
fruitful and has useful applications)

anyway, here's one snippet of reasons that just came to me, and i
thought i'd just throw it out to the open.

For example, one can use different ordering to say the same thing but
with different emphasis, e.g.

do vecnu ta mi

ta se vecnu do mi

means the same thing but with different emphasis.

Now, lojban claims to be isomorphic this or that or logic and explicit
semantic this or that, but here there is a implicit meaning attached to
emphasis. As a manner of speaking, we may ask, why didn't lojban
provide some mechanism to indicate emphasis, instead of using the
rather implicit and undefined emphasis attached to ordering?

  Xah
  xah@xahlee.org
  http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/more.html



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