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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 06:37:20PM +0000, And Rosta wrote:
> "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.

Ah.  I don't know that use.  Can you point me to an example of such
a thing?

> >>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.)

Of course; the CLL does, in fact, cover semantics in quite a lot of
detail (and, I assert, more thoroughly than any such document
natural language; I have no way to measure this though).

> 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, 

Wait what?  How do we not have that?

> 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.

That doesn't do anything for general semantics, though.  IsRed(x) as
a predicate is just a suggestively named lisp token ( see
http://singinst.org/ourresearch/publications/GISAI/meta/glossary.html#gloss_lisp_tokens
and http://lesswrong.com/lw/la/truly_part_of_you/ ); to formalize
actual semantics in the way I think you're talking about, you need
to formalize what it means for something to be Red.  You can't do
that in bare predicate logic; you'd do samething like
HasWavelengthBetween(x,630nm,700nm), but that doesn't help, because
now you have to have predicates for nanometers, and what a
wavelength is, and on and on and on.  Having a complete semantic
mapping of *anything* is a fool's errand, which is why the semantic
web is dead (and was dead before it started).

As far as I can tell, the semantic descriptions of Lojban in the CLL
are about as good as can reasonably be achieved without falling down
the rabbit hole of perfect semantic description, I don't see how it
differs from "spoken predicate logic" in that respect, and I'm very
curious as to whether you have evidence to the contrary.

> >>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.

I don't feel a significant lack there.  If you do, please make
updates to the Notes sections of the various BPFK pages so I can try
to fix it.

-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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