Re: Lojban is *NOT* broken! Stop saying that! (was Re: [lojban] Re: Vote for the Future Global Language)

[Arnt Richard Johansen <arj@nvg.org>]

On Thu, Jan 06, 2011 at 09:13:47AM -0800, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 06, 2011 at 04:51:59PM +0000, And Rosta wrote:
> 
> > What a real grammar would do is define a set of correspondences
> > between sentence forms and sentence meanings.
> 
> [...] I have no idea how you could formalize such a thing (and I'm not
> terribly sure I care, to be honest).

For what it's worth, ERG is an example of such a thing:
http://www.delph-in.net/erg/

To summarize your objection from further downthread: “Formal semantics is just a system for transforming one string of meaningless symbols into another string of meaningless symbols, so what's the point?”

Well, to a certain extent you're right, but if you choose the right kind of semantic representation, you can do things like proving that two different strings of Lojban have the same meaning. Correct me if I'm wrong, but at the moment no machine grammar of Lojban represents the fact that “mi viska do” is equivalent to “do se viska mi”.

I don't think that we absolutely need to have such a thing, and I am certainly not volunteering to make it, but if we did have such a thing, I'm sure it would reveal one or two problems about Lojban grammar that no-one's thought about before.

-- 
Arnt Richard Johansen                                http://arj.nvg.org/
Information wants to be anthropomorphized!

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.