[lojban] on ambiguity

[Remo Dentato <rdentato@gmail.com>]

The discussion about the sentence: "la .alis. sipna le ri kumfa"
triggered a thought that, I realized, was lingering in my mind for
quite some time.

One thing that I really like about Lojban is that it is syntactically
unambiguous but can be semantically ambiguous at will.

The key point here is "at will". The speaker can choose to structure a
phrase in a certain way to (try to) convey a certain meaning or
emotion to the the listener.

Still I see many suggesting or implying that any ambiguity is an
abomination and should be avoided at all cost.  I don't subscribe this
point of view.

I would say that the only "wrong" sentences are those that are not
grammatical, all the others can be "non-sensical" or "ambiguous" but
they are not "wrong".

Since it is grammatical to add a sumti after the ones that have a
definite meaning, the sentence above is "correct".

From a semantic point of view I really think that nobody could have a
problem in understanding the implied relationship between "sleeping"
and "room" and so the sentence seems perfectly fine to me. Yes I can't
be 100% sure that Alice slept in that room but that would be a very
special case. Adding {ne'i} would surely reduce the ambiguity but the
difference to me would be really minimal.

As I said, the speaker may decide to take the risk of being
misunderstood and I think his choice should be respected rather than
pointed out as "wrong".

What I feel strange is that we, as Lojbanist, ask people that learn
the language to be so flexible and sophisticated to understand things
like abstractions and the space/time tenses,  to to be able to pick
the appropriate meaning of a gismu like {pastu} (is it a gown or a
cloak?) and we complain if there's any little ambiguity. After all we
have the wonderful {zo'e} and {zu'i} that clearly *require* the
listener to be active.

Here it is, that is what I like of Lojban. It requires *active*
listeners! Not just passive word-by-word receptacles.  Sometimes I
feel we put too many limits on ourselves under the assumption that the
listener will be too dumb to figure out by him/her-self what we are
talking about.

Some form of ambiguity is necessary while writing to build a climax.
We can't just tell a detective story by telling who's the murderer, we
need to throw a suggestion here and a suggestion there playing with
the words.

The sentence about {sipna} was just an example, I realized that I
wanted to share my feeling toward an attitude that I think I spotted
in the community.

remo

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