Re: [lojban-beginners] Lojban is poor for machine translation

[Chris Capel <pdf23ds@gmail.com>]

On 9/6/05, Naomi K <alien.juxtaposition@gmail.com> wrote:
> "Loglans are poor MT interlinguas" -
> http://www.rickharrison.com/language/mtil.html
[...]
>  What is your view of this argument?

While I could pick it apart on a number of points, I'm sure that it's
already been done in context of the discussion on the conlang list,
and I don't have an interest in bringing that discussion here. But the
arguments aren't very persuasive to me. He even says a couple of
really silly things. But I do wonder about this little note:

"(It has been argued that these pauses could be replaced by glottal
stops. In some cases this is true, especially when one word ends in a
vowel and the next starts in a vowel. However, there are some cases
where a glottal stop will not work: 1.) if a word ends in a voiced
nasal and the following word starts in an unvoiced fricative, stop or
affricate; 2.) if a word ends in an unvoiced fricative and the
following word starts in an unvoiced fricative, stop or affricate. In
these situations a glottal stop will either be impossible to detect,
or will be eliminated through normal phonological processes.)"

Does this point have any merit?

And, as Jorge said, there's really not all that much complexity in
lojban syntax. 95% of lojban speech could probably be parsed with the
same few dozen rules any natural language could, but then it still
wouldn't be machine parsable. That last 5% (for things like {si}) is a
lot of effort.

I do have to say something about this:

"Finally, a logical language is inherenly unsuitable for representing
natural  language. Lojban is called a logical language for good reason
– it forces a speaker to express himself according to various rules of
logic. Natural languages do not  require a speaker to be logical in
the same way."

In my limited experience of lojban, (though mine is probably deeper
than the author of this statement's,) the ways in which lojban
requires unambiguity are ways in which most speakers always have one
intended interpretation, or are consciously trying for a double
entendre. It never requires speakers to be less vague than they would
in a natural language, except that puns are quite a bit harder.

And also. I think it's really a shame that lojban is called the
"logical language". It gives one the impression that people speak it
by manually applying mathematical production rules to semantic tokens
(scribbling notes on paper furiously) and then carefully and slowly
enunciating the result, and then waiting a few minutes for a reply.

No matter what anyone says, I think describing Lojban as being based
on predicate logic is about as sensible as saying the same thing of
English. I would much rather it be said that Lojban was _inspired_ by
predicate logic, and that it only be said if someone asks about the
history of the language.

Lojban, for me, is not a logical language. It's a rational language.
It's a beautiful language. I learn Lojban for the same reason I learn
Lisp. Because I want to do things better. Lojban does human language
better, just as Lisp does computer language better. I wish that I
could say that Lojban is a "scientific" language, but I wouldn't be
communicating my meaning well. It's the aesthetic of scientific
inquiry that is captured. It's the beauty of a well-written computer
program in a good language. It's the beauty of the fugues of J. S.
Bach. To deride that as "logical", in the common parlance, is
farcical, in the same way deriding it as "scientific" would be.
"Rational", or perhaps "sensible", seems though to capture the meaning
as closely as may be possible outside the language context of
logicians and scientists and computer programmers.

And it may be that the beauty of Lojban is really only intelligible to
those trained in a way that they see beauty in the rational.

Chris Capel

P.S. I'm cross-posting this with the main list. Perhaps we could move
replies to there.
-- 
"What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to bat a bee? What is it
like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee?"
-- The Mind's I (Hofstadter, Dennet)