[lojban] Re: Loglish: A Modest Proposal

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

--- Ben Goertzel <ben@goertzel.org> wrote:

> 
> Steve,
> 
> My idea with the "qui" connector in Loglish is
> not that different from your
> idea of using WordNet.
> 
> The idea is that, rather than memorizing
> separate words for each WordNet
> sense, one uses context-specifiers to indicate
> which sense is intended.
> So, for instance you could say
> 
> Ben rock qui sway baby
> 
> Ben listen rock qui music
> 
> This avoids the need to memorize separate words
> for the different senses of
> rock ("rock" as in "rock the baby" and "rock"
> as in "rock music").

The example, though I assume it is not meant
seriously, illustrates the problem that has been
found in these regimented English proposals: the
whole range of ambiguity of the natural language
creeps in -- even if we begin with narrower
specifications of meaning.  and then we have to
modify each word to get away from that, but we
forget or even the usual modifications do not
always work.  And, of course, "words" and thus
sentences get longer and longer.  Lojban at least
begins with fairly unambiguous words with no
inherent tendency to expand those base concept
(what we carry over from our native languages is
another -- but, given the community -- usually
less significant problem).
Loglish also loses what is practically Lojban's
most significant feature for any computer use:
the unique decomposition and parsing.  The unique
decompositionn goes with its abssence in Englsh. 
Were that problem solved, it *might* be possible
to restore the unique parsing -- but it is not
obviously the case and the decompsition problem
looks at least enormously difficult.
I always like the Chinese model for things and so
I kinda like "qui" and "quu."  Chinese has a very
small list of syllable (even taking tone into
account) and is conceptually a monosyllabic
language.  To avoid ambiguity in writing (and
more so now with the various simplification) most
characters consist of a phonetic marker for the
syllable (being updated, but historically with
Tang or earlier pronunciation) and a radical that
classifies the referent in so way -- mostly
adequate for distinguishing several dozen
meanings for the same syllable (several dozen
words, as it were).  In the spoken language the
problem is solved by becoming polysyllabic
covertly.  An ambiguous syllable -- and most are
-- is accompanied by another (or several other)
syllables in a fixed phrase that functions as a
unit and does not bear analysis, generally
speaking.  Of course, much the same pattern of
words is also used to make new compound meanings
which may equally become frozen.  I suppose that
"qui" -- and in another way "quu" -- would come
to function like this in Loglish, both
disambiguating simple expressions and
constructing new complexes. It seems a viable --
though remarkably messy and uninteresting --
idea.  
> I didn't say so in the Loglish language
> specification, but there is probably
> a need for a qui terminator just in case the
> context-specifier is more than
> one word, so one could say (using "quiha" for
> the terminator)
> 
> Ben listen rock qui music quiha
> 
> (unnecessary in this case but useful in rare
> cases where more than one word
> is used in the position "music" is used here)
> 
> One could argue that qui is unnecessary because
> tanru can handle
> disambiguation, but I think it's better to have
> a specific mechanism for
> sense-specification as opposed to
> compound-concept-formation.
> 
> -- Ben
> 
> 
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org
> > [mailto:lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org]On
> Behalf Of Steven Arnold
> > Sent: Saturday, August 13, 2005 8:12 PM
> > To: lojban-list@lojban.org
> > Subject: [lojban] Re: Loglish: A Modest
> Proposal
> >
> >
> >
> > On Aug 13, 2005, at 4:00 PM, Arnt Richard
> Johansen wrote:
> >
> > > To quote your web page:
> > >
> > > # [...] avoid what's really annoying about
> Lojban (the lack of a full
> > > # vocabulary).
> > >
> > > I suppose that lack of vocabulary will
> always be a problem in
> > > knowledge representation systems, until
> someone develops AGI or a
> > > way to extract a suitable dictionary from a
> text corpus.
> >
> > Wordnet is a system that attempts to take a
> set of "core meanings"
> > and associate those meanings with words from
> different languages.  It
> > is accessible over the Internet.  I invented
> a language by writing a
> > program in Python that fetched the list of
> core meanings and assigned
> > words to them from a list.  It was a very
> fast route to a 26,000+
> > word dictionary.  Granted, the dictionary
> needed a little data
> > grooming -- there were a number of words
> that, to me, didn't deserve
> > a separate term.  There were also words that
> I wanted to make sure
> > got shorter words, since I expected them to
> be used more often.  But
> > I think the data grooming was by far the
> minor portion of the task,
> > and by using Wordnet, I saved probably
> hundreds of hours of word
> > development compared to doing it all by hand.
> >
> > That, combined with using Markov chains for
> word generation, created
> > an excellent base language in a very short
> time.  I'd be happy to
> > share the source code of these tools with
> anyone who is interested;
> > email me privately for that.
> >
> > steve
> >
> >
> >
> > To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to
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> > you're really stuck, send mail to
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> >
> >
> 
> 
> 
> 
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> 
> 



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