[lojban] Re: Loglish: A Modest Proposal

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

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

> 
> > This is definitional, of course, but, since,
> for
> > the most part, Loglan syntax is a subset of
> > English syntax (formally speaking, of
> course),
> > the  name seems to fit.  The point is that
> > keeping people to that subset is very
> difficult
> > if they are native speakers (or even very
> fluent)
> > in the full set.
> 
> I'm not sure..
> 
> In a sentence like
> 
> "la Ben cu murder lo chicken lo pliers quu
> weapon"
> 
> half the words are Lojban/Loglish cmavo and
> half are English, and if you
> take out the cmavo you certainly don't have
> syntactical English...

As I noted, I was talking grammar, not surface
structure, so we have agent-action-patient-means
in all the various cases (not some other order,
for example); only slightly up from a totally
fundamental sentence.  But I assume (indeed, you
more or less say) that there are eatterns that
you will not use.  Just what these are remmains
to be seen, of course, but -- even after they are
specified -- how do you keep native speakers from
using them?
  
> I don't really think that sticking to Loglish
> syntax instead of English
> syntax would be a major problem, but as I said
> before, trying to learn to
> speak Loglish fluently is really the only way
> to resolve this issue.
> 
> Unfortunately I've forgotten most of the
> smattering of Lojban I learned 6
> months ago, so for me becoming fluent in
> Loglish will require some effort...
> 
> > It is not clear what percentage of ambiguity
> is
> > which, especially since they often go
> together
> > (different syntactical structures often rely
> on
> > different readings of the same word -- or
> > conversely).  But English words are
> generrally
> > very ambiguous (even when we stick to a
> single
> > etymology for a phonemic sequence) and this
> will
> > carry over into Loglish to its disadvantage
> > (relative to Lojban at least).
> 
> I suspect that the need to specify word-sense
> using qui would push Loglish
> speakers to habitually use less ambiguous
> English words.
> 
> For instance
> 
> "ko get lo tape"
> 
> is ambiguous because "tape" could be the sticky
> kind or the music kinds, so
> one could specify it using
> 
> "ko get lo tape qui music"
> 
> but it's easier to just say
> 
> "ko get lo cassette"

Yes that seems likely to happen -- if folks
remember the ambiguity in crucial cases (usually
the "tape" ambiguity won't be activated, for
example).  

Let me see if I understand what would be the
point of all this.  We can train a machine up in
Loglish and then we can talk to it -- feed it
information orask it question or program it or...
.  Clearly we can do the same in Lojban and
rather more easily, since Lojban is already open
to unique parsing and decomposition, whiles
Loglish needs to have it grammar specified to
reach that point (and then people need to be
trained to stick to that grammar).  Now one of
the thngs we want the machine in question to do
is process masses of linguistic data in English
(I gather).  But these processes -- other than
perhaps actual translation -- have nothing to do
with Loglish, so, assuming the processing can be
done, asking for it, directing it, and the like
can be done as well in Lojban as in Loglish.  Ah,
but Lojban has a limited vocabulary whereas
Loglish has all of English (with some
restrictions imposed by decomposition processes
and parsing and perhaps other things (which
restrictions people have to learn and abide by). 
But Lojban can grow immediately as needed and,
for the most part, the new words will come with
their associations in place from the get-go,
making expanding to deal with them a direct
matter, without consulting WordNet (though it
will help to have a WordNet- like dictionary for
Lojban).  Lojban also has no ambiguity of the
sort that will send Loglish readers to WordNet to
work out what this word means here -- even when
it is "qui" flagged.  So, the machine ill
probably be able (given the paradise that it can
do it at all) to deal with Lojban more rapidly
and accurately (with lkess pre- and post-editing)
than Loglish.  Note that these features of Lojban
are in place, not promissory notes as with
Loglish.  I suppose that it is more likely that
Loglish will be developed for these purposes than
that programs will be developed to deal with
Lojban, but that is an economic accident, quite
separate from the merits of the project from the
point of view of complexity (not factoring the
learning curve, ovbviously). 


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