Re: [lojban] Re: Lojban is *NOT* broken! Stop saying that!

[John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>]

----- Original Message ----
From: David <00ai99@gmail.com>
To: lojban <lojban@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Thu, January 6, 2011 6:11:18 PM
Subject: [lojban] Re: Lojban is *NOT* broken! Stop saying that!



On Jan 6, 8:55 am, Ivo Doko <ivo.d...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5 January 2011 22:58, Pierre Abbat <p...@phma.optus.nu> wrote:
>
> > Esperanto has at least one word which proves that its words cannot be
> > unambiguously parsed...
>
> There are multiple, but that is irrelevant. Like I said, Esperanto never
> even aimed to be fully unambiguous and as thousands of languages worldwide
> (Esperanto included, because it has native speakers) prove, a language
> doesn't *need* to be fully unambiguous to be a usable and working language.

It's worth mentioning at this point that Lojban is not fully
unambiguous nor is it intended to be AFAICS -- Lojban is fully
grammatically-unambiguous while culturally somewhat preferring
semantic ambiguity (since that allows shorter utterances).

**It doesn't have a lot of choice, since it uses words in a culture of sorts.

>
> The main thing that Lojban lacks for being used as a global language is not
>
> > the precise definition of every corner case. It's vocabulary.
>
> I.e. it's not finished, which is what I said.
Let me point out something:
If 'lacking vocabulary' == 'not finished', then no language in
existence is finished. There is no such thing as a universal ontology,
so that sense of finished cannot be a useful distinction.

**universal ontology?  A catalog of everything? a theory of what there is or 
might be?  I suppose philosophical languages do shoot for that, but Lojban does 
not.  It merely hopes that it can be extended to meet every new situation.

>
> ...its morphology is defined so as to prevent collisions like "avaro", it
>
> > takes
> > longer to invent vocabulary in Lojban. You can't take some Latinate term
> > that's commonly used in many languages, some of them unrelated to Latin,
> > and
> > expect to make a brivla out of it just by changing "-us" to "-o". You have
> > to
> > consider whether a lujvo would capture the meaning better, whether the
> > second
> > consonant is in a cluster, and whether the same word could mean something
> > totally different (such as "malpigi" which could be either an acerola fruit
> > or an insect's kidney).
>
> Speaking of which, I think that, unfortunately, is the main flaw of lojban.
> I understand that it can't possibly hope to be literally unambiguous if its
> vocabulary doesn't operate like that, but that ensures that if people ever
> do start to use lojban for everyday communication and if lojban ever gets
> native speakers, its so praised unambiguity will very soon melt away.
> Vocabulary assimilation is unavoidable and you can't possibly expect every
> native speaker of lojban to know which new brivla will create an ambiguity,
> so native lojban speakers would naturally start to incorporate words from
> other languages in their vocabulary, those words would inevitably create
> ambiguities, and after a couple of decades its precious ambiguity would be
> nowhere. (And that's without even mentioning other ways in which a language
> evolves when it's used by people as their main language for everyday
> communication.)

Where you say 'brivla' above, do you mean generally brivla, or the
subset which is fu'ivla/zi'evla? Because only the latter could
generate substantial ambiguity IMO

** Gismu don't generate ambiguity, they just are ambiguous.  It comes with the 
language game.  And where two or theree are gathered together, it gets 
exponentially worse (if ambiguity is a bad thing).

>
> So... as far as I've understood it, this is how it goes:
>
> 1) Let's make lojban the world's official common language because it's
> completely logical and unambiguous.
> 2) lojban is made the world's official common language.
> 3) People use lojban every day to talk to each other.
> 4) As was the case with Esperanto, this eventually results in people having
> lojban as their native language, who proceed to use lojban as their main
> language for everyday communication.
> 5) This makes lojban evolve.
> 6) After a couple of decades, lojban is no longer unambiguous nor completely
> logical and as time goes by is more and more like languages which have
> naturally evolved among humans.

I agree with your predictions here, they are logical; I'll bet that's
one of the reasons why historically we have said 'lojban is NOT aiming
to become a universal auxlang at all'

**Aside from objecting tho this use of "logical" (Spock has a lot to answer 
for), I think the predictions are largely unlikely to happen, even if Lojban 
were declared THE international auxiliary language.  Lojban is not meant to be 
an auxlang because 1) it takes too much thought for most people to bother with 
and 2) the effing politics takes attention away from more interesting things.

>
> Wait, so what was the initial reason to use lojban as the world's official
> common language? After all, lojban's unambiguity and logicality seems to be
> one of the main arguments for that, and yet if it did get chosen for that
> role it will have stopped being unambiguous and logical not long after its
> use became widespread. So if we're going to have an "ordinary" language as
> the world's official common language in the end anyway, why not chose one
> which is not unfinished?

I would be fascinated to see any language you can point to that is
'finished' in that sense.

**I'm not sure yet what "unfinished" means when applied to a language -- 
especially if it means something that Lojban is but some other language is not.



      

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