[lojban] Re: vagueness vs ambiguity

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 7:36 PM, Luke Bergen <lukeabergen@gmail.com> wrote:
> So I've heard people say in the past "lojban is vague, but it is not
> ambiguous".

Don't believe everything you hear! Lojban is syntactically
unambiguous, which means any grammatical utterance can be parsed in
one and only one way. Semantically unambiguous? I don't think so.

> But what is the difference exactly?

An ambiguous sentence is one that can have two or more distinct
meanings, a vague sentence is one that doesn't have a precise meaning.

> "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"?

Not very different, except I would tend to interpret the last part of
the Lojban as "They lost".

(Shouldn't the x2 of kelci be lo selkei rather than lo nunkei?)

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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