[lojban] Re: lojban as an auxiliary language

[Chris Capel <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

On 9/2/05, Brandon Wirick <brandon@yrick.com> wrote:
> While communication
> between humans can be very non-technical, information that we actually
> wish for computers to understand tends to be of a technical nature,
> which Lojban is great at!

Hmm. It seems to me that the hardest part of making the semantic web
really work is getting everyone to agree on the same intentional
meaning for any given word. Lojban vocabulary tends to be a bit less
overloaded than English, but the extensional boundry of any given word
isn't much less fuzzy, in general. And when you start to think about
lujvo, well, things go downhill pretty quickly. If Lojban were to ever
be used in a widespread manner, many lujvo would acquire two distinct
senses based on different interpretations of the tanru, or an
assortment of slightly different place structures for the same
meaning. So does Lojban really help this part of the problem?

> Lojban should be the primary language for
> ontologies, software agents, RDF documents, etc., making translation
> only necessary to Lojban from natural languages and vice versa.
> Restricting conversations to technical communication would make this
> actually plausible.

I'm really not sure I understand you here. Are you arguing that people
should voluntarily avoid using Lojban for non-technical communication
so that it remains usable for technical purposes? And how would that
make it more usable?

Chris Capel
-- 
"What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to bat a bee? What is it
like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee?"
-- The Mind's I (Hofstadter, Dennet)


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