Re: [lojban] English

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

Remember that Lojban claims to be ambiguity- free in only two respects: every Lojban utterance can be uniquely decomposed into words, whose syntactic type is fixed, and every sentence that passes the official grammar has only one parse tree.   This not a trivial claim, since most languages, including much simpler conlangs, do not have either of these properties. But when we move on to semantics, this is not enough to guarantee unique readings.  Lojban is clear on transformation involving conjunction relations between two or more sentences with common elements, but not so much on deep structure below the sentence level.  In particular, tanru are opaque, ambiguous,  though other, less common, structure are as well.
Sent from my iPad

On Sep 27, 2011, at 11:20, And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com> wrote:

> Escape Landsome, On 27/09/2011 15:41:
>>> since the range of
>>> occasions when we actually want time-flies-like-an-arrow or
>>> someone-loves-everyone ambiguity (e.g. poetry) is much smaller than the
>>> range of occasions when we want to avoid it.
>> 
>> Are you sure ?
> 
> I'm sure for myself and for most people; and even in poetry I more often find myself, when writing it, as opposed to reading it, striving to forestall ambiguity or misreading of ambiguous phrases than to capitalize on it. Of course, someone might perfectly legitimately prefer a language that is ambiguous, but given that we have 6000 ambiguous languages and 1 unambiguous one (Lojban), it seems a bit unreasonable to criticize Lojban for providing what the other 6000 don't.
> 
> --And.
> 
> 
> 
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