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

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

----- Original Message ----
From: And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Thu, January 6, 2011 10:51:59 AM
Subject: 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.

**but, so far as we can tell and act upon, A and B are the same here, that is, 
people do conform to the formal grammar.  And will continue to do so for some 
time.

> 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.

**Are we quibbling here about the difference between syntax and grammar?  There 
is a use of "grammar" that is all-encompassing, from phonology through 
pragmatics, and Lojban certainly doesn't have that, though it lacks only the 
last two chunks,  But, since these have resisted formulation in Linguistics so 
far, even at the theoretical level, it seems unfair to criticize Lojaban for 
lacking what Logic and Linguistics have yet to provide good models -- or even 
criteria -- for.  Efforts along this line tend to involve and idealized 
representational language, almost all of which end up looking a lot like first 
order predicate logic, meaning that the crucial step in the process from Lojban 
form to meaning would be -- with a few caveats -- a snap.  The only interesting 
question about Lojban's A syntax is whether all and only semantically 
significant substructures are also syntactic substructures.  This was certainly 
not true in earlier versions, but I can't read modern syntax well enough to know 
whether it is now or not (I seem to recall that bridi tail was a particular 
problem in this respect).

> 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.

** Being unique in this way can hardly be a flaw in the language, especially if 
your aim (or your ultimate criterion) is the cionstruction of a complete 
pragmatics).

> 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.

** I need to be reminded of what "compositional" means here and see some 
examples of problem cases.  The problems with "if" and the milk-or-cream joke 
are real enough but clearly don't need solutions outside the existing syntax, 
only a better use of what is already there (stiop thinking of them as 
connectives being one useful approach). 


> 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).

** Check.  Do the semantic and syntactic substructures congrue?

> 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.

**But, of course, a large portion of that community came to Lojban precisely 
because of the claim to be unambiguous in one fairly major way.  Without that 
claim, the group would be significantly smaller, nearer, say, toki pona (maybe 
50 with a little fudging and an awareness base pf a few hundred).
--And.

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