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Re: Lojban is *NOT* broken! Stop saying that! (was Re: [lojban] Re: Vote for the Future Global Language)
Please don't say "general semantics" even in lower case; the hellish odor of
that whole cult is still too much with us.
----- Original Message ----
From: Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Thu, January 6, 2011 12:51:51 PM
Subject: Re: Lojban is *NOT* broken! Stop saying that! (was Re: [lojban] Re:
Vote for the Future Global Language)
On Thu, Jan 06, 2011 at 06:37:20PM +0000, And Rosta wrote:
> "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.
Ah. I don't know that use. Can you point me to an example of such
a thing?
**Complete for a language, no. Models for (small) parts of languages, look in
any old anthropological linguistics journal.
> >>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.)
Of course; the CLL does, in fact, cover semantics in quite a lot of
detail (and, I assert, more thoroughly than any such document
natural language; I have no way to measure this though).
> 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,
Wait what? How do we not have that?
**Well, scope limits are undefined for most quantifiers (which are
indeterminately defined themselves) and for negations and alternate world
functions (real modals), for starters. This just needs decisions by someone,
writing them up, and getting people to actually use them. It is not a flaw in
the syntax, except that it means some semantically distinctive substructures are
not (reliably, at least) syntactically distinct.
> 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.
That doesn't do anything for general semantics, though. IsRed(x) as
a predicate is just a suggestively named lisp token ( see
http://singinst.org/ourresearch/publications/GISAI/meta/glossary.html#gloss_lisp_tokens
and http://lesswrong.com/lw/la/truly_part_of_you/ ); to formalize
actual semantics in the way I think you're talking about, you need
to formalize what it means for something to be Red. You can't do
that in bare predicate logic; you'd do samething like
HasWavelengthBetween(x,630nm,700nm), but that doesn't help, because
now you have to have predicates for nanometers, and what a
wavelength is, and on and on and on. Having a complete semantic
mapping of *anything* is a fool's errand, which is why the semantic
web is dead (and was dead before it started).
**It is, of course, logically impossible to define all of the terms of a
language in that language without either circularity or contradiction. It is
possible, however, to define all the terms of a language in another language,
here the semantic metalanguage. It is incompletely specified, but can
completely specify Ebglish, say, or Lojban (of course, it doesn't exist and the
models for it have all so far been flawed).
As far as I can tell, the semantic descriptions of Lojban in the CLL
are about as good as can reasonably be achieved without falling down
the rabbit hole of perfect semantic description, I don't see how it
differs from "spoken predicate logic" in that respect, and I'm very
curious as to whether you have evidence to the contrary.
> >>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.
I don't feel a significant lack there. If you do, please make
updates to the Notes sections of the various BPFK pages so I can try
to fix it.
-Robin
--
http://singinst.org/ : Our last, best hope for a fantastic future.
Lojban (http://www.lojban.org/): The language in which "this parrot
is dead" is "ti poi spitaki cu morsi", but "this sentence is false"
is "na nei". My personal page: http://www.digitalkingdom.org/rlp/
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