RE: [lojban] Re: Loglish: A Modest Proposal

["Ben Goertzel" <ben@goertzel.org>]

Hi,

> The Anglan page arj cites covers the main
> objection to your proposal from the point of view
> of the Lojban Project.

True, but the quu construct in Loglish seems to me to get around this
objection in a reasonable way.

> Others have noted (in
> other contexts of a similar sort -- Basic
> English, for example, or spoken C and the like)
> that, for a native speaker of English, sticking
> to the regimentation is practically impossible,

I am not at all sure this is correct in the case of Loglish.  My wife and I
have been experimenting a bit with speaking Loglish to each other and
sticking to the regimentation doesn't seem difficult at all.  Of course, we
are unusual in that we're both highly conversant in predicate logic, with
significant experience formalizing knowledge in predicate logic; even though
we're Lojban novices...

> and for folks who aren't English speakers the
> system offer no advantages (taken by itself) over
> learning the underlying formal language alone.

On the contrary, for folks who aren't English speakers Loglish still offers
a big advantage over Lojban, which is the existence of a complete English
dictionary.  Whereas using Lojban seriously, at this stage, involves
constantly having to make up new words, which has a fun element to it, but
is also a pain....

However, this is basically in irrelevant point, because there are damn few
people in the world today with the intellectual background to be interested
in speaking predicate logic, but without any knowledge of English.  (And
true fluency in English is not necessary for Loglish to be a lot easier than
Lojban.)

> Even if the claim that learning Lojban vocabulary
> is a snap (or, at least easier than for other
> languages) is a sort of cruel joke, the rewards
> of doing it (for folks who will get something out
> of Lojban) repays the time and trying to duck
> around that task cuts one off from much of the value.

You may well be right, but I'm not convinced by your arguments.

To prove I'm right, however, I'd have to actually become fluent in Loglish,
and then teach a couple others ;-)

One of my main interests in using Lojban is to communicate with some actual,
existing AI programs (such as ones I've written).  But these AI programs
already have some knowledge gained from information extraction algorithms
acting on English texts.  So, in order to pragmatically use Lojban with my
AI programs, I'd have to create a bunch of linguistic resources mapping
Lojban into English.  (jbovlaste doesn't come close to being adequate,
useful though it is.)  On the other hand, to use Loglish with my AI programs
would require significantly less work, though not a trivial amount of work
either.

Also I suspect it would require significantly less effort to train people to
encode knowledge into an AI program using Loglish than Lojban; though this
is speculative and needs to be validated.

-- Ben