On 9/17/08, Seth Gordon <sethg@ropine.com> wrote:
Lojbanists praise the language's unambiguousness, but human beings are so good at resolving ambiguous messages that I'm not sure the lack of ambiguity gives Lojban much power.
I think it's possible to underestimate Lojban's difference in this respect, and I think it shows some of how Lojban can involve a different way of thinking. We're certainly good at resolving ambiguities in natural language, but what we're equally good at on the other side is structuring our language so that ambiguity happens to be avoided. We speak casually in ways that are habitual and familiar, relying upon habit as a crutch, or we carefully arrange large sentences so that it's possible to understand them. Ambiguity is reduced to a managable level overall in the process of communication, true, but only as a result of a certain effort.
Lojban resolves certain ambiguities in a radically different way, is all: Rigorous termination instead of loose familiar structures. It's sort of the difference between tinker toys that click together at distinct angles (Lojban) vs long pliable fibers that can be woven together (natlangs). Lojban seems clunky if you expect it to flow in the graceful interweaving lines of natlang grammar. It's only once you accept it as what it is-- these angular, distinct interlocking pieces-- that you can begin to use Lojban to construct the kind of bizarre swirling avant-garde contraptions that natlangs could never dream of.
My experience of speaking in English is of thinking of phrases and stringing them together, trying to make them self-similar enough that everything implies properly what else it's trying to be talking about. There's a certain cognitive effort in putting together a phrase, making it run smoothly, and it mostly consists of seeing that the references and movements of the sentence are expected enough that the reader poor dear won't be derailed. My experience of speaking in Lojban is of having certain referents in mind, and relationships between them, then describing them all in whatever order, along with decorations explaining why everything's there and what it means. The cognitive effort isn't in making sure the phrase falls together properly by its habit & semantics, but rather just seeing that it's properly structured, that it puts things where they are meant to be, and that things are described with clarity.
I enjoy speaking complicated English well enough, but there is something spectacularly sparkling clean about writing a larger sentence in Lojban that no other language I know of can touch. I felt very different writing the following sentence than I did writing this English text:
le nu mi cusku dei do kei
le nu mi tavla fo la .lojban. kei
le nu mi prenu gi'e pilno le jbobau kei
le nu mi jbota'a gi'e jbopre kei
cu du le ca fasnu
(An event of I express this to you,
and an event of I talk in Lojban,
and an event of I'm a person and use a Lojbanic language,
and an event of I Lojban-talk and am a Lojban-person,
are all the same event and are happening now.)