The old logic joke is that ambiguity means having too many meanings and vagueness means not having enough. That is, an ambiguous _expression_ has two or more clear cut meanings where as a vague one has one very murky meaning (no sharp boundaries, lots of wiggle room). As for Lojban, it is not markedly more vague than other languages nor less semantically ambiguous either (like your case below). What it is is monoparsed, that is, there is only one grammatically correct way to read a sentence. All other attempted readings are ultimately ungrammatical. Within that framework, however, any level of vagueness or semantic ambiguity is possible (and probably occurs). (The questions of whether there is a language that speakers actually speak or writers write that has this property
of monoparsing which the theoretical language of the grammar has is somewhat open still.)
From: Luke Bergen <lukeabergen@gmail.com>
To: lojban-list@lojban.org
Sent: Thu, October 22, 2009 5:36:56 PM
Subject: [lojban] vagueness vs ambiguity
So I've heard people say in the past "lojban is vague, but it is not ambiguous". But what is the difference exactly?
"John and Jim played a game. He lost". I've heard this example used to explain how english is "ambiguous". But how is this different from {la djan joi la djim kelci lo lo nunkei .i ra toljinga} which I guess is "ambiguous"?