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Re: Lojban is *NOT* broken! Stop saying that! (was Re: [lojban] Re: Vote for the Future Global Language)
Well, the non-brivla stuff is, of course, also the non-predicate logic stuff, so
we are beyond semantics into pragmatics -- about which we have even less of an
idea than semantics. As for return to formal logic, the untangling of Logjam's
involuting is fairly easy in theory but does occasionally break down: scopes, as
you note, interdigitating argument streams, and a few others. The residuum is
probably going to require at least intensional second order theories (whatever
the Hell they are) (feelings of deja vu -- did we have this discussion -- or
something like it -- over the last twenty years?)
----- Original Message ----
From: And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Thu, January 6, 2011 12:37:20 PM
Subject: Re: Lojban is *NOT* broken! Stop saying that! (was Re: [lojban] Re:
Vote for the Future Global Language)
Robin Lee Powell, On 06/01/2011 17:13:
> On Thu, Jan 06, 2011 at 04:51:59PM +0000, And Rosta wrote:
>> Lojban's so-called formal grammar does
>> nothing but define a set of structures of phonological strings.
>
> That's what "formal grammar" *means*;
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_grammar
You're quite right, but you'll see that the article says that formal grammars
are for formal languages, and (in the description of formal languages in the
article on formal languages) that formal languages aren't human languages. A
"formal grammar" in this sense is irrelevant to the specification of a human
language.
"Formal grammar" has a further meaning in linguistics, which is "grammar
formulated in an explicit way", and it's this meaning that is relevant to the
specification of a human language.
>> What a real grammar would do is define a set of correspondences
>> between sentence forms and sentence meanings.
>
> I don't know what that is, but it's not a formal grammar. Ask
> google if you don't believe me. :)
>I have no idea how you could formalize such a thing (and I'm not
> terribly sure I care, to be honest).
If you think about it, I think you will find you do care. Obviously the
essential function of a language is to define correspondences between forms and
meanings. If your putative specification of a language describes only possible
forms and says nothing of meanings, then it is simply not a specification of a
language. (Rather, it would be a specification of a "formal language" in the
sense referred to above.)
As for you having no idea how to formalize such a thing, surely you can imagine
having and implementing the design goal of a speakable predicate logic (which
was one of Loglan's original goals). Retrofitting such a thing onto existing
Lojban would be difficult, but surely the principle of it is easy to grasp:
rules that take the phonological forms of Lojban sentences and translate them
into predicate logic.
>>> We know far more about how Lojban grammatical structures work
>>> than *any other actually spoken language on the planet*.
>>
>> This is one of the attractions of explicit,(A)-wise definitions.
>> But of all actually spoken languages on the planet, Lojban is the
>> only one that has an explicit, (A)-wise definition, so Lojban wins
>> this competition by having no competitors.
>
> I *know*. :D Isn't it awesome!?!?
Certainly awesome enough for it to have kept me interested in it for the last 20
years.
>> The design of the language itself has little
>> intrinsic excellence (when viewed ahistorically), and it is naive
>> to deny that it is massively incomplete.
>
> I completely disagree. I don't see anything even vaguely
> approaching "massively incomplete" in any part of Lojban, except
> maybe vocabulary. I'd ask you to point to specific examples, but
> I'm honstly not sure that I'm terribly interested in debating the
> issue.
The major incompleteness is in the specification of correspondences between
forms and meanings (i.e. predicate logic). I don't mean the definitions of
individual brivla, but rather the meanings of sentences containing nonbrivla
stuff.
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