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

[Craig Daniel <craigbdaniel@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 3:34 PM, Arnt Richard Johansen <arj@nvg.org> 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”.

It is not equivalent, because of different emphasis. The details are
not explicitly spelled out and may well vary a fair bit from one
Lojbanist to another, but no human speaker is going to deliberately
pick a longer phrasing of something if they don't intend the choice to
be meaningful. The only difference is pragmatics, but one of them
violates a Gricean maxim, resulting in the implication that the other
choice was less well-suited to what the speaker wished to convey.
Subtle, but basic - well, basic to a subfield of linguistics that we
have been largely ignoring since JCB started the whole project. (I'm
not saying we *should* try to formally spell out Lojban pragmatics,
either; I'm not sure that particular task is tractable even in theory.
I'm just disagreeing that "mi viska do" and "do se viska mi" will ever
be equivalent in actual usage generated by any human or any software
whose linguistic behavior obeys similar principles.)

Esperanto was defined with a lot of morphology and little syntax; in
practice, it is as syntactically rich as any natlang, because human
language use works like that. Lojban as a very precisely defined
syntax and absolutely no official pragmatics, but all human language
use is affected by considerations of such.

> 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.

Almost definitely.

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