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Re: [lojban] Another question: Loglan/Lojban
At 01:32 PM 9/1/01 -0400, pycyn@aol.com wrote:
I don't think it is the case any more -- if it ever was -- that translating
from one of Loglan& Lojban to the other is merely a matter of substituting
one word for another and perhaps occasionally changing a construction.
Yep. Still is. TLI Loglanists use a somewhat different style, and their
place structures make less use of abstractions (or at least obvious use),
but for the most part it is still a word for word substitution.
Lojban is provably grammatically unambiguous, with all the rigor aboout
grammar that that entails, while Loglan's grammar may work but is not (last
time I checked) completely proven and so is slightly more free.
McIvor has said that it is now completely proven, and I have no reason to
disbelieve him. Their main weakness when last I heard was in the Preparser
stuff - they did not have anything like the YACC-ruled lexer grammar that
Lojban has, the last time I saw a TLI formal grammar. I'm not sure how
they resolved the "lenu"/"le nu" problem.
In the
decade and some of separation a number of changes have occurred in both,
rarely in the same direction.
Nope, actually the changes have almost always been in the identical
direction, with TLi usually around 5 years behind Lojban. The one major
difference was "me" where we adopted one of their changes.
There are two or three things that they have adopted that we explicitly
rejected, but I think even there we can do a one-way transform into Lojban
pretty easily.
Most of them are the result of solving a
problem when it turned up, though quite a few in Lojban are the result of
rethinking whole areas from scratch: the humongous tense system, for example,
or the plethora of negations available, or the enriched emotion/attitude
systems.
The poster asked for differences in the grammar, and these are some key
areas in which he could start. Also, for all the endless debates these
days on subtleties of semantics, what Lojban has done with the abstractions
that JCB's version has present in rudimentary form (his "po" "pu" and "zo"
are our "nu", "ka", and "ni", but I don't think that our debates on the
meanings of these would make any sense in the TLI language context.
It has been argued that you can say anything that you can say in
Loglan in Lojban abvout as easily,
and usually by direct substitution of words or constructs.
but that there are Lojban expressions
which cannot be nearly as easily rendered in Loglan. All the examples
proposed have been challenged, but most of the challenges have been
questioned, so it is not clear wheether there is any advantage in that
respect either. What Lojban has at the moment is a thriving community, while
Loglan is deep in a continuing transition phase with the resultant loss of
continuity of purpose and membership.
I had to go back to May to find a sentence written in TLI Loglan on their
list, showing the effects of their ongoing losses, but here we have:
> Ibuo mi danza lepo lo logli fa bleka lemi pidri ice lei sundi lo nu
> jupni mi.
which word for word into Lojban is
.iku'i mi djica le nu loi dzejbopre ba catlu lemi papri .ije ly/[dy] benji
loi se jinvi mi
ly/dy is a lerfu anaphora for logli/dzejbopre, so I have to change the
lerfu in translating to get the proper reference. Otherwise this was
purely mechanical. I'm sure a longer text might have one or two
difficulties that would take rephrasing, especially if there were place
structure difference, but this did not.
lojbab
--
lojbab lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org