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Re: [lojban] Response ro Robin's "Essay on the future of Lojban"

Timo Paulssen, On 09/04/2010 22:46:

And Rosta wrote:

A language is a system of rules mapping between sounds and meanings.
By that sensible definition, Lojban is nowhere near "pretty close to
good enough". The so-called 'grammar' doesn't deserve to be called a
grammar, since all it does is give meaningless structures to
phonological strings. CLL does make a start on the definition of the
rules of Lojban, but only a start. Some users of Lojban don't realize
how meaningless or semantically indeterminate their utterances are.
Some, I presume, don't care. Others are frustrated. And perhaps in a
small Lojban-speaking enclave of Argentina, they've created their own
much more complete dialect.


I'm neither in the "don't care" nor in the "is frustrated" camp. Please
explain what you mean by "meaningless or semantically indeterminate"?


Bob would be in the Don't Care camp and Robin in the Frustrated, for a large chunk of BPFK work had to do with the attempt to specify what stuff means.

For many syntagms (phrases, etc) one is simply not sure what the meaning of the whole is, even though one knows the meaning of the parts -- because the specifications of the language don't state how the meaning of the whole is formed. I'm not talking about tanru vagueness but rather clear semantic ambiguities such as over quantifier scope. Lojban list used to be absolutely awash with discussion of these, in the days before the BPFK. I'm reasonably sure that a workable set of rules for compositional semantics exists in xorxes's mind, so the prospects for Lojban, under Robin's reforms, getting an adequate compositional semantics strike me as fairly rosy.

--And.

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