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

[Craig Daniel <craigbdaniel@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 9:11 PM, Ivo Doko <ivo.doko@gmail.com> wrote:

> In any case, this is what I meant:
> "It is not true that lojban is fully defined and that lojban is complete and
> that lojban is a functioning language."
>
> That *must* be equivalent to:
> "lojban is not fully defined, or lojban is not complete, or lojban is not a
> functioning language."

No, because "and" binds in two different ways in English when negators
get involved. ("Or" behaves similarly, and worse it also gets used for
both a logical OR and a logical XOR, with both meanings carrying the
same syntactic ambiguity. Natural languages misbehave like that.) It
*must* be equivalent to either that or (.onai/aut):

"lojban is not fully defined, and lojban is not complete, and lojban
is not a functioning language."

Which is not the meaning you intended, and not the one I personally
got from it, but in context I'm not surprised others read it that way.

Moral: Lojban is better at these things. Absent the clarifying
mediation of tone of voice (and sometimes even with it), it can be
useful to add the missing specificity in English - though it often
takes hindsight to realize when, pragmatically speaking, it wasn't
filled in by context. (Secondary moral: pragmatics is an important
area of study for Lojbanists, even though it's less precisely defined
- or definable - than syntax is. English pragmatics do an amazing job
of filling in some of the holes left by syntax.)

 - mi'e .kreig.daniyl.

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