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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 18:51:

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?


Google for "formal linguistics" and you get this use or variations on it.

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


Of course.


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?


We have it partially but not completely.

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.


No, it's the job of the language specification to link the form /red/ to the (notional) encyclopedia entry for Red, but not to specify the content of the encyclopedia entry. Similarly, it is the job of the language to say that phoneme /c/ is realized as [S], but not to then define the phonetics (aerodynamics, acoustics, etc.) of [S].

So the semantic task of the language specification is (i) to define the meanings of terms that don't simply point to an encyclopedia entry and (ii)  to define how meanings combine to yield sentence meanings.


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.


CLL is partial but incomplete (which is not to derogate CLL's achievement or excellence). Thinking back to ten years ago, there were two main sorts of problem. One was that even where CLL specifies what X means and what Y means, it doesn't specify what X and Y mean when they occur together, especially which has scope over which -- i.e. the 'syntax of semantics'. The other was that important stuff such as kau constructions didn't have translations into predicate logic (or anything similar).

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.


I appreciate the offer, and once upon a time I devoted a huge chunk of my spare time to pointing out stuff that needs fixing -- to what was at the time a community led by Lojbab that believed nothing should be fixed and everything left to usage. Nowadays I lack the time and to some extent the motivation.

--And.

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