[lojban] Re: lojban ills: implicit emphasis

[John E Clifford <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

Whether or not conversions (reorderings) serve a
useful rhetorical purpose (emphasis or the like),
they have a major logical purpose, getting the
quantifiers (and the like) in the right places
wwithout putting everything in prenex normal
form:

{roda prami de} is not {de se prami roda} (s
reordering does not always preserve semantic
content) being the convenient forms of the more
"logical" {ro da su'o de zo'u da prami de} and
{su'o de ro da zo'u da prami de} respectively.

The device is not enough to cover all cases, but
it takes care of the vast majority.

--- Ben Goertzel <ben@goertzel.org> wrote:
> 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 
>   To: lojban@yahoogroups.com 
>   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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> 
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