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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 05/01/2011 16:52:
Lojban is *FAR* more fully defined than Esperanto.
Natural languages are defined by what their speakers know (or do). An invented language may be defined either (A) explicitly, by means of formal grammars and suchlike, or (B), like a natural language, by what their speakers know (or do). Esperanto is defined only (B)-wise. There are some Lojbanists, such as Lojbab, who would prefer a (B)-wise definition for Lojban too, but I guess most folk attracted to the idea of a logical language would want an (A)-wise definition for it.
No, really: it is. Esperanto doesn't have a formal grammar of any
kind, for starters.
But nor does Lojban. Lojban's so-called formal grammar does nothing but define a set of structures of phonological strings. What a real grammar would do is define a set of correspondences between sentence forms and sentence meanings.
However, even though Lojban has no true formal grammar, I think it would be easier to write one for Lojban than for almost any other language that has a speech community, though one expects it would be hard for the community to accept it as definitional.
We know far more about how Lojban grammatical structures work than
*any other actually spoken language on the planet*.
This is one of the attractions of explicit,(A)-wise definitions. But of all actually spoken languages on the planet, Lojban is the only one that has an explicit, (A)-wise definition, so Lojban wins this competition by having no competitors.
We have already won that prize: Lojban is the most precisely,
formally specified language that there is, for any language with its
number of speakers or higher. Period. I challenge anyone to find
anything even *remotely close* to the CLL in terms of covering every
*possible* grammatical combination. Even if you can find such a
thing, the formal grammar takes it so far ahead of everything else
they can't possibly hope to catch up.
The virtues of Lojban are indeed as you say they are, for any language with its number of speakers or higher. But this is pf course far more of a tribute to Lojban's success in acquiring a user community than to its formal specification.
The truth of the matter is that you really
*can* say anything you want in Lojban; LNC and alis prove that
pretty conclusively, I think.
This is debatable in a number of ways. First, the formal specification doesn't explicitly cover everything ordinary language might require (cf. problems with "if", with alternatival questions, etc.). Second, the claim could be true in only the trivial sense that the basics of predicate structure are sufficient to express all needed meanings; i.e. you can ignore everything but predicate structure and define new predicates to express whatever meaning you need. Third, some of the conventions that have arisen in usage to express needed meanings are not compositional, so their status as licit Lojban is questionable.
4. Nobody shouts "Wow this is well specified!!!" at the top of
their lungs, but they certainly shout their complaints. Geeks have
a shared culture that compliments are private and insults are
public; it's deeply fucked up. See
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/
The impressive thing is the vitality of the user community, and the amount of labour folk have invested in it, not the specification. It would be easy -- with the benefit of experience -- to improve on the specification enormously, i.e. easy to design a language better in every conceivable way. But it would be nigh-on impossible to achieve a lojban-scale user-community for it.
I can say anything I need to say in Lojban, modulo my own vocabulary
knowledge.
It may well be that for any meaning you want to express, you have a way of expressing it and find that others will understand you. This is not the same thing, though, as it being possible to take your sentences apart and show *how* they mean what you think they do. If you have cooperative interlocutors, you can speak a very broken mangled version of language X and still be understood. Indeed, when all interlocutors know the language only very imperfectly, they may simply be oblivious to all the mistakes. And it can happen that some mistakes are so frequent that in actual usage they override the formal specification (e.g. prexorlo gadri).
This puts it ahead of 99.999% of conlangs.
But maybe not ahead of 99.999% of conlangs that somebody is at all likely to claim are adequate to all ordinary communicative requirements.
Saying that
it is very far from being complete and functioning is ridiculous,
and pretty insulting to a lot of people's hard work.
Whoever is insulted by that misunderstands what people's hard work has achieved. The design of the language itself has little intrinsic excellence (when viewed ahistorically), and it is naive to deny that it is massively incomplete. The achievement has been in building and sustaining the user-community, so that of all languages with a user-community, Lojban is the one that comes closest to being an explicitly specified logical language. The language itself could not have been substantially improved without great detriment to the user-community.
--And.
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