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

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

> This is definitional, of course, but, since, for
> the most part, Loglan syntax is a subset of
> English syntax (formally speaking, of course),
> the  name seems to fit.  The point is that
> keeping people to that subset is very difficult
> if they are native speakers (or even very fluent)
> in the full set.

I'm not sure..

In a sentence like

"la Ben cu murder lo chicken lo pliers quu weapon"

half the words are Lojban/Loglish cmavo and half are English, and if you
take out the cmavo you certainly don't have syntactical English...

I don't really think that sticking to Loglish syntax instead of English
syntax would be a major problem, but as I said before, trying to learn to
speak Loglish fluently is really the only way to resolve this issue.

Unfortunately I've forgotten most of the smattering of Lojban I learned 6
months ago, so for me becoming fluent in Loglish will require some effort...

> It is not clear what percentage of ambiguity is
> which, especially since they often go together
> (different syntactical structures often rely on
> different readings of the same word -- or
> conversely).  But English words are generrally
> very ambiguous (even when we stick to a single
> etymology for a phonemic sequence) and this will
> carry over into Loglish to its disadvantage
> (relative to Lojban at least).

I suspect that the need to specify word-sense using qui would push Loglish
speakers to habitually use less ambiguous English words.

For instance

"ko get lo tape"

is ambiguous because "tape" could be the sticky kind or the music kinds, so
one could specify it using

"ko get lo tape qui music"

but it's easier to just say

"ko get lo cassette"


-- Ben