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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 06/01/2011 17:13:
On Thu, Jan 06, 2011 at 04:51:59PM +0000, And Rosta wrote:
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
You're quite right, but you'll see that the article says that formal grammars are for formal languages, and (in the description of formal languages in the article on formal languages) that formal languages aren't human languages. A "formal grammar" in this sense is irrelevant to the specification of a human language.
"Formal grammar" has a further meaning in linguistics, which is "grammar formulated in an explicit way", and it's this meaning that is relevant to the specification of a human language.
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).
If you think about it, I think you will find you do care. Obviously the essential function of a language is to define correspondences between forms and meanings. If your putative specification of a language describes only possible forms and says nothing of meanings, then it is simply not a specification of a language. (Rather, it would be a specification of a "formal language" in the sense referred to above.)
As for you having no idea how to formalize such a thing, surely you can imagine having and implementing the design goal of a speakable predicate logic (which was one of Loglan's original goals). Retrofitting such a thing onto existing Lojban would be difficult, but surely the principle of it is easy to grasp: rules that take the phonological forms of Lojban sentences and translate them into predicate logic.
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!?!?
Certainly awesome enough for it to have kept me interested in it for the last 20 years.
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.
The major incompleteness is in the specification of correspondences between forms and meanings (i.e. predicate logic). I don't mean the definitions of individual brivla, but rather the meanings of sentences containing nonbrivla stuff.
--And.
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