On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 11:23 AM, Martin Bays
<mbays@sdf.org> wrote:
There have been a few attempts to do it in practice - I know of Nick
Nicholas' Prolog semantic analyser
http://www.lojban.org/files/software/analyser
, Rob Speer and Catherine Havasi's Jimpe
http://web.mit.edu/rspeer/www/research/jimpe.tar.gz
. I haven't managed to get either to run, due to bitrot, but they're
interesting anyway. I also have a WIP of my own along similar lines,
taking a more completionist tack, which I may release one day (I got
stuck on handling gadri).
I would like to see whatever you have whenever you feel comfortable sharing it. I have been working on my own loglangs for a while, but I don't seem to be getting anywhere lately, and I have little to date to show for it, so I think I am going to spend more time studying the ongoing attempts to formalize and specify Lojban as those attempts unfold in this community.
However, there are plenty of hurdles in the way of completion of such
a project.
Yes there are. While Lojban semantics may, or may not, ever have a complete, agreed-upon formalization, having gone back over the close-scope {zo'e} thread recently, I do think there is slow-but-steady progress in the form of insight being gained. I think it's especially promising that professional research is increasingly being studied and applied to Lojban by people like you and Xorxes and others. Carlson and Chiercha are new to me, but Montague I have been aware of for a while.
But basically, I totally agree that developing a model-theoretic formal
semantics is (a) essentially doable, and (b) the best way to specify
this currently woefully underspecified language.
I agree, but getting everything to work together will probably take a long, long time. I suspect that ultimately something with the rigor of Montague's program, which was conceived
to discover a universal grammar, but is extremely formal and only ever managed to cover a small fragment of English, is going to be needed to formalize a whole loglang. That's a thought to give one pause!
Martin