RE: On international applications of Lojban

["Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <lojbab@xxxxxx.xxxx]

At 01:27 PM 01/01/2000 +0000, And Rosta wrote:
>Here's a combined reply to Lojbab and Brook.
>
> > It can be spoken and written (unambiguously), and it is languagy enough
> > that someone can learn it as a language (I doubt that many can learn
> > predicate logic as a language).
>
>There's nothing to say but that we disagree, in that I do think that
>people could learn it at least at the intellectual level that people
>learn programming languages. They mightn't be able to learn it as
>a natlang, but on the other hand, for a limited purpose like legislative
>texts this might not be a bad thing, and anyway, Lojban too, taken as
>a whole, might be insuperably unnatural.
>
> > By this argument, the efforts to develop an interlanguage for machine
> > translation would need only use predicate calculus. But instead the
> > closest that anyone has come to successfully using an
> > interlanguage was the DLT project that used Esperanto.
>
>I don't know why this was. Maybe they wanted to translate aspects of
>form as well as meaning. And very probably it was easier to work out
>the mapping from natlangs to Esperanto than from natlangs to something
>as stark as predicate logic form.

I would contend that form sometimes is part of meaning. We know for 
example that sumti/object ordering can put convey emphasis.

But it is precisely the problem of working out mappings from natlangs to 
predicate logic vs. Lojban that makes the difference. To map to predicate 
logic, you have to explicitly think of things that are subliminal in 
Lojban, like prenex/quantification issues. There is also brevity: I 
believe pc once said that quantifiers other than the standard logical 
quantifiers in pure predicate calculus form get extremely verbose.

That is why learning something as a natlang or quasi-natlang is critical to 
these sorts of applications. It is a matter of speed and confidence that 
you've done it correctly. Programming languages come close but fall a 
little short of the mark of knowing you've done it right just by writing it 
out, as well as of fluency in writing.

And the fact that not all programmers are good lawyers and vice versa 
suggests that there is a distinction in skills between the kinds of 
accuracy in logic that are needed.

> > > In a Polish/Reverse Polish predicate
> > >logic notation ...
> > >Likewise, the entire syntax could be formulated in a single
> > >sentence.
> >
> > But could human beings use it to describe a patent?
>
>I don't see why not.

I said human beings. And maybe I should have included "read" a patent 
too. Human beings wrote Principia, but very few human beings can read it 
with any understanding.

> > And what happens when you need to translate an indirect question? After
> > all, haven't you just found that it is a fairly intractible problem for
> > predicate logic?
>
>Hopefully it is tractable. But I'd use a special WH quantifier if the
>language had to be done today.

>From what pc has said, different schools believe different things, and 
that in itself means that the problem is intractable at a logical 
level. At a language level it is tractable because language is more 
tolerant of ad hoc conventions than predicate calculus.

Legal language is of course nothing but a full raft of conventions that 
have been established based on natlang understandings. The closer a 
"coding language" can come to mimicking the natlang conventions, the easier 
it is to get judges to agree that the conventions are understood the way 
that the lawyer intends. That translating legal language into a new 
language in itself runs a risk of destroying conventional precedents that 
is as hard an argument to overcome as any linguistic one; our main 
advantage in this case is that the patents have to be translated anyway.

> > >Of course the predicate words' senses have to be defined. But in 
> Lojban the
> > >predicate words' senses are not defined -- this task has been left to
> > >'usage' to achieve.
> >
> > And patent translation would be a large amount of usage.
>
>Exactly. I don't know anything about patents, but a great deal of law
>involves decreeing definitions of terms.

Yes. And you can define Lojban predicate words, so that is not a 
problem. Law would not rely on "usage" in Lojban any more than it does in 
English. Important terms will be carefully defined.

> > > If so, I guess that they problem with predicate calculus is
> > >that there's no fudgeability with it, which nonfudgeability is exactly why
> > >one wants a logical language.
> >
> > But fudgeability is fine for patent translation (maybe even desirable to
> > the lawyers), so long as the fudguing does not create an ambiguity
> > comparable to those of natlangs.
>
>By fudgeability, I mean the possibility of being ambiguous when you
>can't be bothered to disambiguate, or when disambiguation is more
>trouble than it's worth.

Well then fudgeability is IMPORTANT for legal translation, because there 
are places where lawyers WANT to leave meaning a little 
ambiguous. Ambiguity can allow two sides in disagreement to come to terms, 
leaving the ambiguous areas to be worked out later if necessary. You need 
to be arbitrarily precise in some areas, but Lojban's allowing of ambiguity 
when precision is too much trouble (or agreement is impossible) is an 
advantage.

> > You learn the forms of predicate logic, more or less (but how many people
> > actually use the full set of Lojban logical connectives, for
> > example?). But you do not learn to reason according to the rules of
> > inference along the lines of the predicate calculus.
>
>True, but that's also true even if you learn pred calc notation.

I think though that you have to learn to reason with predicate calculus in 
order to accurately write in it. You also need to be able to do so with 
Lojban. In looking at the indirect question discussion that you recently 
conducted, I can imagine identifying and discussing the logical problems 
with everyone's formulations entirely in Lojban. I cannot imagine doing so 
entirely confining ourselves to predicate notation. Maybe some logicians 
can, but not me.

> > If you did learn this
> > inherently while learning Lojban without having to study the subject, I
> > daresay that the original SWH concept for Loglan will have been proven.
> >
> > I also think that a lot of that "extra stuff" is exactly the sort
> > of thing needed for patents, technical writing, formal specification, etc.
>
>Which stuff?

Brook answered this better than I did.

> Again,
> > the attempts I know of anguages for these arenas have tended to have some
> > logical construct to them, but have always had to fall back on a natlang
> > like form. If not enough like a natlang, they haven't been learnable; if
> > too much like a natlang, they haven't been sufficiently unambiguous.
>
>Given that pred logic notation differs from natlangs in its extreme
>simplicity, it would be interesting to find if some system can be so
>simple it is unlearnable.

Not unlearnable - just too difficult to use fluently. The computer 
language APL was loved by some people for its terseness, but the terseness 
also prevented some people from being able to use it effectively. They 
couldn't grok things that were so terse. I have similar problems with 
C. I understand what "i++" means (increment the variable i), but when 
it is used in a C program written by skilled C programmers, too often my 
understanding hits a wall when I hit that usage.

>Maybe an advantage of Lojban here is that it is public domain and
>culturally-neutral in the sense of not, say, being the progeny of
>a single commercial organization. The Linux of logical languages,
>as it were.
>
>But if I wanted a logical lang that was only going to be used
>in-house, then numerous modifications to Lojban could be made to
>make the language easier to learn than Lojban, and yet as
>effective. Basically, the main modifications I'd make would
>involve discarding tons of stuff and changing the gismu forms to
>lightly modified English.

"Discarding tons of stuff" means using a language subset. I wouldn't 
expect usage of Lojban for patents to do anything other than use language 
subsets. As for the gismu forms, as I said: you are reproposing "Anglan" 
and the advantages people see in the idea just don't pan out in actual 
trial. If you change the morphology, of course, you lose the 
self-segregating aspects and thus spoken/written interchangeability.

> > The point is that any top-down application of an artificial language big
> > enough to point the way to large scale usage will inherently require that
> > the language be easy to learn, with sufficient language learning materials
> > that many can learn it by self-study and most anyone with more than minimal
> > verbal ability can learn it with a teacher. The latter will of course take
> > sufficient skilled Lojbanists to serve as teachers. In short it is the
> > "rapid bootstrap" problem that anything really new tends to have a steep
> > and time-expensive learning curve. We have to reduce that steepness to
> > make Lojban successful.
> >
> > > I agree that there are these
> > >obstacles to the adoption of Lojban. And as I've said, I think Lojban
> > >and Esperanto would be poor choices for a patent language, or for a
> > >European IAL.
> >
> > As a patent language it has to go beyond pan-European. Our German
> > proponent of the Lojban patent effort cited the difficulty of
> > translating Japanese patents as a strong reason in Lojban's favor.
>
>Two different things are getting confused here. A patent language (which
>I am actually thinking of a more broadly a legal language), and an EU
>IAL.

I think I have been sticking solely to the legal/specification language 
issue. Legal language is still a natlang, albeit an extremely 
conventionalized one. (Indeed legal English can be said to be a subset of 
English just as legal Lojban would be a subset of Lojban).

> > I see it as my job as President of LLG to work towards the goals of all
> > Lojbanists, including some that you may feel are less practical. I got
> > into this project out of a sense of duty, which later expanded to
> > become a sense of mission. There are people who want to seriously work
> > on finding applications for Lojban. I need to make sure that LLG
> > provides the resources needed to make such efforts realizable,
> > regardless of whether the goals that the efforts are aiming at will be
> > achieved. The best thing I can do is to make it so that when people
> > try to promote Lojban for a top-down goal, that there is enough
> > substance backing them that they do not seem foolish just for trying.
> > And if I do that, real money might "happen", since venture capitalists
> > these days are betting on a lot of things with
> > even slimmer odds for success than Lojban.
>
>Okay, now I do see why you should care so much.

If I didn't care, I never would have gotten started. I never had the 
"conlang bug" and wasn't all that interested in language or linguistics 
before I was forced to do so by my role leading the Lojban effort.

> > > And the original idea that a loglan-speaking
> > >community would test sapirwhorf, I've always regarded as a bit of blarney
> > >baloney by JC Brown who really wanted to invent a language but
> > was trying to
> > >(a) gain respectability for an ill-respected activity, (b) differentiate
> > >the product from others, (c) attract adherents.
> >
> > I know the history enough to be sure that it was not blarney at the
> > time. Remember that in the mid-50s, testing SWH was a big deal.
> > Remember also that JCB came from the Campbell school of science fiction
> > which I think had a certain amount of SWH built into it. He does seem to
> > have conceived of Loglan before the SWH became big, but I think that he
> > seriously wanted to make the language a research tool.
>
>You know the history better than me. The main reasons why I came to the above
>conclusions are firstly that it seems improbable that anyone would seriously
>propose Loglan as a psycholinguistic experiment, since the experiment is
>so uncontrolled and it takes so much effort to set up,

I think that JCB himself has a fundamental lack of understanding of the 
problem of controls, as well as the nature of scientific testing. If he 
had understood, he might never have started %^). Look at Chapter 7 of the 
now on-line L1, and you can see what he envisions as a SWH test. But the 
problems are tractable, IMO - they just need a LOT more thinking out.

There were similar criticisms of JCBs scientific procedures during the 
redesign of 1979-84. JCB conducted "taste tests" with Loglan users to 
choose among various options for affix formation, but his experiments were 
uncontrolled (not to mention only performed by English native speakers), 
and his statistical conclusions were apparently, umm, skewed to get the 
answers that he wanted. McIvor wrote a devastating criticism of the 
methodology which was a key trigger starting of the political split; McIvor 
later reconciled with JCB of course. I won't say any more, since he can 
speak for himself if he wishes (I think he is subscribed at the moment - RAM?)

> and secondly that
>thereafter JCB showed himself much more interested in all the designing
>and tinkering and so forth that conlangers are so familiar with, and also
>introduced additional design goals. If he'd been serious, he could have
>genuinely invented a speakable predicate logic in a short span of time,
>and then, say, raised funds to pay people to learn and use it or to
>participate in experiments that oblige or incentivate them to learn and
>use it.

Well here is where the history comes in. JCB did try to do these 
things. His original Loglan, the 1956 version, "rattled around in people's 
heads" (Cowan quoted this more accurately than I did), (I've never seen a 
copy of the 1956 'book', of which only a couple hundred mimeo copies were 
made), and people couldn't learn or use it effectively. So he started 
adding flesh to the language, developed his peculiar learnability schemes 
(the word making algorithm is something he actually claims to have tested 
on groups of students, unlike most other aspects of the language, though 
again we have no idea what typo of controls he used).

With his first wife, JCB apparently did a fair amount of serious language 
work more aimed at teaching rather than fiddling in the early 60s. In many 
ways I think that we he went through then was something akin to what we 
went through in the few years of writing the Book - questions came up which 
he made decisions on, but he did not have the advantage we had of an 
Internet community to poke holes in his occasional 'brain farts'. He 
published the first L1 in microfilm in the mid 60s, which was the first 
chance more than a couple people had to actually look at what he was 
working on, but few changes were made in the language until after 1974.

The book publishing in 1974-5 shows that he probably thought that the 
language as "done" then. He DID stop fiddling, and started research grant 
proposal writing to get funding for SWH experiments and such. Put 
politely, his 1976 proposal was mabla. Meanwhile the computer people 
showed him that the language wasn't as unambiguous as he had thought, the 
attempts of the earliest to try to write in the language showed copious 
flaws, and then the fact emerged that he had screwed up the "pretty little 
girls school" analysis and omitted needed cases. Meanwhile NSF told him the 
proposal was inadequate, and JCB reacted by producing two more proposals 
that were even worse (not having worked in academia for 15 years, he 
apparently did not know the standards for proposal writing), and then 
declared war on the NSF evaluators, using its formal protest procedure to 
the utmost while having no valid issues. That was the end of the 
possibility for JCB/TLI ever conducting funded research.

I think that JCB turned to language fiddling only because the research 
aspect was closed to him and the fiddling was where the action was in the 
community that was left. I think he has always wanted to see people using 
his language, as the necessary step to wherever, and the fiddling was in 
his mind probably kept to the minimum necessary to gain usage (as well as 
to keep control once we started outdoing him). TLI's attitude towards 
change was MUCH more conservative than LLG's until we baselined. I think 
JCB honestly thought the language was done in 1974 and then again in 1984, 
but in both cases his community showed him he was wrong; now he cannot 
commit to saying it is done, because at that point he will lose control 
(actually, he HAS lost control, because we exist and thrive relatively 
speaking, but TLI has nothing left once JCB ceases to be the hub of the 
wheel of change).

>I disagree on this. It depends on the nature of the more focused problem,
>but for the patent/legal problem, I claim that the lg could be done
>quickly, possibly be using parts of Lojban.

And I have no qualms against using a language subset. It is changes and 
not subsetting that would hurt the project. Use of a language subset in a 
top down application will cause people to look at the rest of the language 
for other, less constrained applications, including those where a full 
range of communication is more desireable. (International diplomacy for 
example is a superset of international law, but requires all of language 
including a thorough set of attitudinals in order to be effective. What is 
the attitudinal for Khrushchev's shoe banging, I wonder?)

> > Culturally neutral is a biggy. Nonconstraining and flexible are probably
> > important, because patent writeups in various natlangs to be translated
> > into Lojban will have their own natlang style and idiosyncrasies. And
> > patent writeups tend to use very complicated language structures.
>
>I'm probably displaying my ignorance of patent write-ups then. I was
>assuming that all that counts is their pure content, and that issues
>of style and the structures used in the source language are irrelevant.

They might come to be. But at first the patent application will be as an 
interlanguage for translating patents that were originally written in other 
languages. Once Lojban patent legal conventions were established and 
people wrote patents directly in Lojban (which would inevitably happen if 
indeed Lojban was adopted as the "real" language for patents), it will be 
Lojban conventions that dictate the meaning not the translated stylistics 
of a language multitude.

> > Finally, looking at predicate calculus (or *any* calculus, for
> > that matter) is misleading because it ignores the question of *vocabulary*
> > (a point lojbab makes below). Try programming in Prolog with no libraries.
> > Sure, you can write quick-sort in a couple of lines, but what are you
>going
> > to *do* with it? And how do you map it to the real world?
> >
> > Lojban has that in the form of gismu - predicate calculus does not.
>
>It's precisely because this is an area of noncomparability that this issue
>is a red herring. Pred logic notation is proposed as an alternative to
>Lojban syntax and cmavo. As I originally said, you need predicates. I
>don't think Lojban gismu are adequate, because they're not yet defined,
>but if you think they're adequate, then the Lojban gismu could be used
>as the predicates in the language I'm mooting.

If Lojban predicates are not sufficiently defined, I fail to see how any 
alternative approach would be better. You mentioned using English-like 
gismu earlier, but that just reduces to the problem of translating into 
legal English. English has ambiguous grossly polysemous words. Legal 
English has conventions to deal with English grammatical 
ambiguities. Legal Japanese has different and incompatible conventions in 
both words and grammar. To write something intelligible to both requires 
choosing something that tackles both sorts of ambiguity. In addition, for 
the European world, English-like means un-sellable to the French.

> > > In other
> > > words, setting aside how variables are handled, you could have
> > > a language with only 3 cmavo! I'll admit that that number might
> > > be expanded a bit, e.g. to include numbers, but even an expanded
> > > cmavo inventory would be only a tiny proportion of Lojban's.
> >
> > A perfect example of going too far towards minimalism. Sure,
> > AND, OR, and NOT are all you need to make any other truth function
> > but you better believe people that build ICs for a living don't
> > recreate a one-bit adder from AND, OR, and NOT every time they need
> > one - they don't even use one-bit adders - they pull more useful
> > things from a library - 32-bit add, multiply, etc. and a whole lot
> > of other stuff.
>
>I can't think of which Lojban cmavo represent huge savings in
>convenience over a combination of predicates and basic connectives
>and quantifiers.

The quantifier 5/mu is much briefer than the predicate logic method of 
saying "5". Lojban's set selection operators and massifiers are much more 
flexible than logical objects. (pc established long ago that logical 
connectives are ineffective for truth-tables of 4 or more elements and 
aren't that great even for 3).

And then there is tense. I've looked at pc's book on tense logic. I will 
never understand it.

> > What? Okay, lojbab is hard at work on a dictionary (in his, I'm
> > sure, copious spare time) but gismu are as well defined as any word
> > you care to name in any language - better, in fact, because they only
> > ever have *one* definition (try looking up "run" or "fork").
>
>Either you have in mind some notion of "defined" that I cannot apprehend,
>or what you say is wrong. Lojban Central correctly declares that gismu
>aren't defined and that definition will be left to usage. In other
>words, in its gismu definitions Lojban will operate like a natural
>language rather than an invented language.

The place structures are baselined. But this I think is incidental since 
the gismu alone are not adequate to a legal language. So there will be 
need to coin new words and define new meanings in any event, and that 
process will mimic the natlang way.

> In natural languages, usage has already defined the meanings of words,

For any given language. But the translation problem makes these polysemous 
definitions less than ideal. I also think that natlang words are often 
less well-defined than some Lojban gismu (in that you often don't even know 
the implied place structure without contextual interpretation).

> and on them there is
>intersubjective agreement, such that they are a fit subject for
>rational debate and quasiempirical research (in the subfield of linguistics
>usually called 'lexical semantics').

Which field is understood and followed by lawyers, right? I wonder if any 
percentage of lawyers have ever heard of Montague.

> > (but then, I believe in Sapir-Worff)). But learning
> > predicate calculus is not the same as learning a language. Kids soak up
> > language without having to be taught. No one does that with
> > predicate calculus.
>
>It has never been put to the test whether kids could soak up a language
>with the grammar of predicate logic notation. Or, on another view, many
>linguists believe that this is effectively what all children do: Deep
>Structure in the Generative Semantics version of Transformational
>Grammar, and Logical Form in the Government-Binding version (and its
>equivalent in the Minimalist version) are close approximations to
>certain versions of predicate logic notation.
>
> > Now, unless you believe that "subject", "verb", and "object" are
> > hardwired into brains, I'd submit that a young child exposed to a
> > fluent lojban speaker could pick it up easily enough (I'm not fluent,
> > but my three-year-old daughter seems to get the hang of lojban easily
> > enough).
>
>I don't understand. Since we agree that a subset of Lojban is a close
>approximation of predicate logic notation, surely if a child picks
>up Lojban, they have picked up predicate logic notation.

No. They have picked up a linguistic manipulation of predicate logic 
notation. I doubt that his daughter could read the notation (if she can 
read at all). We may be getting into an issue over the primacy of speech 
vs. writing here.

> > Um, but you may also recognize that "Better is the enemy of good
> > enough," and see the reduced costs of using something in existence, even
> > if it isn't quite what you were looking for.
>
>I do.

I realize and appreciate that. At one time, you were our pet 
iconoclast. Now you write Lojban.

But I think anyone who'd been on the list for a few years would know
>it, and would know that there's a hallowed tradition of me being impolite
>to Lojbab. But I promise you I'll be giving him a big hug when I meet
>him, assuming he's the sort of chap who acquiesces in being given big
>hugs by people who've spent years being impolite to him...

I keep waiting for the day. But you'll likely come over here before I have 
a chance to get there, alas.

> > Flexibility isn't necessary for describing *inventions*?
>
>I wouldn't have thought so. By flexibility, I was thinking of "having
>many ways to say the same thing". Not "being able to say lots of
>things".

Flexibility in being able to say things at an arbitrary (but variable) 
level of specificity depending on the relative importance of precision vs. 
ambiguity. For example, a patent on exercise equipment (say a treadmill) 
may need to distinguish precisely distinguish between "run" and "walk", but 
a patent on a procedure that involves a person travelling on foot does not 
need to.

> > And cultural neutrality seems like a very desirable trait for patent
> > description in the *European Union*! Even more so for global patent uses.
>
>For global, yes. But the EU is very eurocentric and there is no tradition
>whatever of cultural neutrality; rather, europeanicity is celebrated at
>every opportunity.

But the EU has to deal with patents written in non-European languages, 
which is where this thing started. Hartmut Pilch mentioned the difficulty 
of translating Japanese patents into European languages, none of which was 
particularly compatible with some of the problems in Japanese language 
use. Lojban is MUCH better than any European language in representing 
ARBITRARY language features unambiguously.

> > If you pared Lojban down to the smallest adequate portion you'd still
> > > be left with unnecessary stuff (e.g. zo'u, terminators) and
> > what remained
> >
> > Your particular examples of zo'u and terminators seem again, perhaps not
> > strictly *necessary* but so useful to merit inclusion.
>
>Again, I don't see why, but I guess that would be more appropriate for
>discussion on some generic loglang list.

There isn't any such thing, and I think expanding this could be informative 
(outside the context of multihundred line posts on an unrelated thread %^)

> > Em, no, I'd disagree - look to the incredibly broad applications
> > of patents in software that are being put in place, in part because of
> > ambiguity of definitions (see "run" and "fork" again, only talk about it
> > to a computer programmer).
>
>I don't understand what you mean. I was making a point about the etymology
>or mnemonicality of lexis and your response seems not to bear on this.
>Perhaps you are saying that for wholly new ideas we need wholly new words?

Well it certainly would be nice if people wouldn't reuse old ones. Lojban 
allows useful blending of reuse and coinage both with fu'ivla and lujvo-making.

> > > Second, if it is possible to do better than Lojban, with the same
> > > set of goals, this is largely because it is possible to learn
> > > from Lojban's 'mistakes', i.e. it is by standing on Lojban's
> > > shoulders that Lojban can be bettered.
> >
> > Please, do so! :-)
>
>I'm not clear why you keep responding in this way. If you had a genuine
>idea to explore the way in which we think Lojban might be bettered,

I think such a topic is germane to Lojban List (so long as we don't 
actually try to change it). Knowing limitations and flaws is a useful 
thing, especially since Lojban will see no end to criticism whether it 
catches on or not.

> > > Also, in a certain sense, it has been proved that it is easy to do better
> > > than Lojban, because over the years people have often proposed valid
> > > improvements that were not adopted (on the grounds that completion was
> > > a more important goal than improvement).
> >
> > A cost/benefit tradeoff - did the change improve things enough to
> > destabilize the design? I wasn't there, but I'll bet it didn't.
>
>Whether it did or didn't, that wasn't an issue. However much it did improve
>things, it would only be permitted to destabilize the design if the
>design were shown to be failing to meet the language's explicit goals
>(e.g. if a hitherto unnoticed syntactic ambiguity were discovered). The
>rationale for this was as I stated before.

In practice, if you look at the set of changes that were incorporated 
during the grammar baseline, you will see that we did add things that were 
not "broken". In addition to destabilization, "relearning" was an issue 
that affected tradeoffs. earlier in the development, backwards 
compatibility with TLI Loglan was very high in priority because we believed 
rapprochement was inevitable. (I still believe it is inevitable, but 
probably not while JCB is still alive to keep his core 
together. Afterwards, similarity between the language versions will be 
useful in gaining their support, but it is hardly as important to us as it 
was 10 years ago. Still, eventually reuniting the Loglan community behind 
Lojban would greatly enhance our credibility in the auxlang world - there 
is a first for everything!)

lojbab
----
lojbab ***NOTE NEW ADDRESS*** lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:
see Lojban WWW Server: href=" http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban/ "
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