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

[Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>]

On Thu, Jan 06, 2011 at 09:34:41PM +0100, Arnt Richard Johansen
wrote:
> 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”.

Right, very true.  People have started playing with that.  Also,
quoting from elsewhere in the thread:

  xorxes and I have done *some* work on "formal" definitions of
  cmavo; see
  http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=BPFK+Section%3A+gadri
  , and I have occassionally fantasized about picking a few
  predicate-logic-related words as axioms and defining the entire
  rest of the language in terms of them.

> 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.

*nodnod*

-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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