Re: [lojban] English

["fagricipni" <lojban707@fagricipni.com>]

On Tue, September 27, 2011 05:54, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 11:50:09AM +0200, Escape Landsome wrote:
>> Give me an example of it, with a lojban ambiguous sentence and
>> glosing/explaining it in English, and I will tell you if this is
>> what I call ambiguity or not...
>
> {.ui klama}
>
> "Yay!  Going!", approx.
>
> Perhaps said at the beginning of a road trip?  Who is
> going/travelling?  Where to?  Why is the speaker happy, exactly?  we
> don't know.
>
>> (btw, ambiguity exists in other ways that the semantic one)
>
> Of course.  If there's a particular kind of ambiguity you have in
> mind, feel free to give an English example.

I've seen ambiguity used in English in nefarious ways a lot; so
perhaps in some of the cases you are talking about losing the
capacity for ambiguity the benefits outweigh the costs.  Your
argument may also have some relevance as to whether Lojban will
succeed as an international auxiliary language -- Esperanto
probably has the features you want (though, I admit that I
don't know much about it) --, but I am interested in language
as a means of expression; if nothing else, the non-ambiguity of
Lojban forces one to think more clearly; in my case, it also
allows to make precise distinctions that are had to make in
only a few words in English, even if I "cheat" in English by
using underlining to indicate the proper groups to be lexed
together.  And one should fairly notice if they read my
writings that my use of English punctuation would have most
English teachers pulling their hair out.  Lojban makes it much
simpler to express my more complex thoughts clearly.

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