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Re: [lojban] Lettorals
Ok, this is going to be my last response on this thread because my frustration level is making coherent thought difficult and I don't want to end up making a stupid argument or regretting something that I say later on.
Your understanding of evolutionary theory is clearly off. You're claiming that evolutionary processes yield an ideal design consistently?! Have you looked at the inefficiencies of the human body? As I said before, evolution in biology and in every other field is LAZY. Does this thing survive long enough to re-produce? Yes? Great, it's good enough. Does this eyeball do it's job well enough to make the animal survive? Yes? Great, good enough. Just because something is good enough that does not make it ideal or even "good" for that matter.
No, lojban is not ambiguous, it is vague. Vagueness is an absence of meaning, ambiguity is too much meaning. Others can speak to this more proficiently than myself.
"No natural language features even
remotely similar mechanism for handling pronouns, which can only mean
that our "hardware" is not a priori "wired" in a way in which such
handling of pronouns comes naturally to it."
This argument completely does not hold water. Nor do you give any basis for your claim. Please tell me more about how the brain does language processing. Specifically can you go into the neural pathways used when processing pronouns? Shoes did not arise naturally, we designed them. Are you telling me that the human foot just doesn't work with shoes because shoes are a human designed construct?
And if you don't like the construct, then don't use it. Just use {ra} everywhere you go and it'll be just like english. Nice and ambiguous. (I guess I've just proven myself wrong in that regard, {ra} can be thought of as ambiguous which is probably why it doesn't see much use).
</rant>
Sorry for being so confrontational on this point. I remember reading through the CLL and finding all kinds of "problems" with lojban only to have xorxes or gejyspa put me in my proper place. I shouldn't be so impatient. .u'u
On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 2:35 AM, Ivo Doko
<ivo.doko@gmail.com> wrote:
On 27 April 2011 07:09, Luke Bergen <
lukeabergen@gmail.com> wrote:
> Haha. If it's better then evolutionary pressure would make it happen.
> That's why walking is better than flying in a jet in every way.
when it is better than walking, don't we? Case in point that
evolutionary pressure does its job. And yes, for beings such as we,
walking is generally better than flying because handling tools is more
important than being able to fly and evolving wings alongside arms
would require too big a jump from local fitness maximum.
> And yes, English allows you to be unambiguous and clear but the fact that it
> also allows the lazy speaker to be ambiguous and confusing is a flaw in the
> language.
I thought lojban also allowed the speaker to be as much ambiguous or
unambiguous as (s)he wanted. Or did something change while I wasn't
looking?
> I'm confused how you can go through that explanation of what it was that
> mabel sold and say "see, nice and easy" but then gejyspa's explanation of
> "it's a pronoun for whatever last started with that letter" is "messy and
> confusing".
Because it *is* messy and confusing. No natural language features even
remotely similar mechanism for handling pronouns, which can only mean
that our "hardware" is not a priori "wired" in a way in which such
handling of pronouns comes naturally to it. (Which doesn't mean that
I'm saying that it can't be learned - it is an extremely flexible
piece of hardware we are talking about here.) As opposed to that,
inductive reasoning (which I demonstrated in understanding the example
with Mabel) *does* come naturally to the hardware, which is why no
natural language features specific mechanisms for minimising the
requirement of inductive reasoning in understanding of the language.
> Just because it's not your first language doesn't make
> it inherently messy and complicated.
Which is not what I said. English is not my first language either
(although frankly, my first language is an Indo-European language so
it's not like learning English was too much trouble).
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