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[lojban] Re: How to spread the word
On Sunday 07 September 2008 21:17:58 Auke Booij wrote:
> Good question. To me, the biggest difference lies near the philosophical
> and metaphysical field, where people often talk about undefined ideas.
> And then they come to strange conclusions.
This is a very good point in my opinion.
During the last few months, I have starting studying
various works of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer,
and Kant in German, which is my first language.
Quite often, I could not be sure how far
an 'and' ("und") extends, or how many scopes
were terminated by a ','.
Maybe sounding trivial, in descriptions of abstract thought constructs,
the difference often is very important.
Whenever I find such a place, I realize the significance
of grammatical unambiguity.
If I'm not sure about the structure of a bridi,
I can always hand it to the parser.
My impression is, that those thinkers often tried
to help the reader interpret their works - the way
they intended them to be interpreted - by explaining
the same thought several times in other wording.
'Just to make sure the reader gets it right.'
[Sure, semantically, doing this may be useful
in lojban too, but I refer to the case of different wordings
so that 'an idea of the thought' helps understanding the
scoping by allowing for exclusion]
I am confident lojbanic works are innately capable of achieving
a higher level of denseness, - given the structure of thought
takes the lojbanic features into account.
But it's not only 'denseness' as in shortness. Nowadays,
I think it can be said to be commonly accepted
that good (English) style (educational) is writing in short, simple sentences.
In German, it's often even suggested to read the English (educational) books
instead of the German ones, as they are less cryptic.
Old German (I don't really know about old English or other languages),
however, is something very different. Sentences of more than a page are no
exception. Complex thoughts are not put into several sentences,
but more often than not described as one.
I don't dislike that style, it has it's pros and cons: It certainly
is harder to read, you have to remember (or rather reread)
half a page precisely to understand the other half,
but it also is more perfect in being a description of the underlying
though. The many-short sentence style feels rather like an
introduction into the aspects of the thought to me,
being less coherent/dense.
The less/large-sentence style profits enormously from Lojban,
for grammar is unambiguous. However many sub-sentences
there are, you can always pick out one of them and
study it in isolation first. However cryptic the negation seems,
you can always move it over negation boundaries and see if it's,
more clear this way. (Even if you get the thought, moving the
negation sometimes so drastically changes the appearance
of the thought, that you may have to think it over once more
to understand it fully)
I wonder what Schopenhauer, who tried to create a system of reason,
similar to maths in that statements and thoughts could be proven to be right
or wrong, would have said to Lojban, which offers a seamless unification of
unambiguous (predicate) logic and human language (capable of describing
feelings and properties and putting the world in words).
mu'o mi'e nam
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