[lojban] Re: lojban ills: implicit emphasis

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

It is also important to note that Lojban is
constantly being compared to a rigorous formal
grammar while natural languages are not.  Given
any serious proposal for the formal grammar of a
natural language, much of the "freedom" would
disappear as ungrammatical (on that grammar; we
could construct another that made the piece just
lost grammatical, but that would probably mean
the loss of something else).  Even with what is
left, the natural language would be ambiguous in
countless ways (assuming we do not put too many
restrictions into the grammar) and, as such, a
less than ideal device for conveying information.
 Too be sure, many of these ambiguities don't
puzzle anyone; they are disambiguated by context
and a number of other factors that are not
readily encodable. In a similar way, much
ungrammatical Lojban is also perfectly (well,as
good as natural languages) intelligible even if a
machine can't quite figure it out (people are
always leaving out {cu} and elidable terminators
and even {be} but are understood at least as well
as someone who fails to mark agreement or misuses
subordinating conjunctions in English).  When we
get down to devices that a natural language has
in correct usage, it is hard to see what Lojban
lacks (the process of looking for them has been
going on for fifty years now, so one expects the
job is pretty near finished, especially
considering the attitude of many of the searchers
over that time).  English (etc.) which had to be
understood by a machine (which is something that
underlies Lojban) would be at least as lacking as
Lojban (if Lojban is) -- and probably more so,
since Lojban has grown up with that
narrow-mineded interlocuor in mind.

But, that having been said, when you find a cse
that Lojban can't do with something like English,
say, simplicity (and that is grammatical in
English), point it out and some clever soul will
either tell us how to do it at the level in
existing Lojban or have figured out a minimal
patch that flows smoothly with the rest of the
language (prediction based on a long history of
its happening).

--- Robin Lee Powell
<rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 18, 2005 at 03:32:45PM -0500, Ben
> Goertzel wrote:
> > But I can see a lot of mechanisms in Lojban
> where, if they were
> > removed, then the language would be highly
> difficult to use for
> > informal communication.
> 
> True.
> 
> > On the other hand, natural languages are
> really redundant -- you
> > could remove a LOT of mechanisms from a
> natural language and it
> > would still be practically usable, because
> there are so many
> > workarounds...
> 
> Definately true.
> 
> > With Lojban, clearly there are no (or hardly
> any) mechanisms that
> > could be removed and still leave the language
> usable.....  
> 
> Not true.  You could drop all of the mekso
> cmavo, FA, and SE with
> only very minor restrictions resulting.  In
> fact, (with my parser at
> least), you could drop BAI, which is the
> largest cmavo group in the
> language, as well.
> 
> That's just off the top of our (the people on
> #lojban) heads.
> 
> > And my guess is that there are a few
> mechanisms that will still be
> > added to Lojban in the future to make the
> language more usable
> 
> I doubt that we'll see any new cmavo groups at
> this point, although
> it's not entirely impossible.  We're trying not
> to change the
> language any more, but only to fix serious
> problems.
> 
> > It seems like it has been a lot of work to
> add enough mechanisms
> > to Lojban to make it usable without
> sacrificing the spirit of the
> > language..
> 
> So I gather.  I wasn't around for that.
> 
> -Robin
> 
> -- 
> http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ ***
> http://www.lojban.org/
> Reason #237 To Learn Lojban: "Homonyms: Their
> Grate!"
> Proud Supporter of the Singularity Institute -
> http://singinst.org/
> 
> 
> 
>