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Re: Lojban is *NOT* broken! Stop saying that! (was Re: [lojban] Re: Vote for the Future Global Language)
On Thu, Jan 06, 2011 at 04:51:59PM +0000, And Rosta wrote:
> 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.
*nod*
> >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.
That's what "formal grammar" *means*;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_grammar
> 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).
> >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.
I *know*. :D Isn't it awesome!?!?
> >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.
*nod*
> >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.
Fair enough; we leave a lot to context in practice. I'm OK with
that.
> >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.
Sssshhhh! Stop spoiling my rants with evidence! :P :)
> >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.
I completely disagree. I don't see anything even vaguely
approaching "massively incomplete" in any part of Lojban, except
maybe vocabulary. I'd ask you to point to specific examples, but
I'm honstly not sure that I'm terribly interested in debating the
issue.
-Robin
--
http://singinst.org/ : Our last, best hope for a fantastic future.
Lojban (http://www.lojban.org/): The language in which "this parrot
is dead" is "ti poi spitaki cu morsi", but "this sentence is false"
is "na nei". My personal page: http://www.digitalkingdom.org/rlp/
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