Re: [lojban] Re: Is there any demand for LoCCan3?

Hey &, long time no see, etc. Well, we are less far apart than a casual reading might suggest. I did recall (incorrectly, obviously) that you were into tight semantics as well, but the rest fits in nicely with the problem set from of old. Wrapped up, as I am professionally, in variables, I tend to see the same-argument problem as just a matter of assigning variables at the right time and place, but that over looks the fact that variables are an essentially inefficient (for purposes other than precision, at least) way of doing things. As a result, I tend to see the major problems as RHE and un/packing. To be sure, for strict concision (syllable counts, say), vocabulary is a problem, since the shortest legitimate Lojban content words are already as long as the average English ones. But going to CCV, for example, raises other problems which, while not strictly relevant to the formal adequacy of the language as a loglang, cut into its practical applications sharply. The RHE and un/packing problems go together, because, even if there is a successful parsing program for Lojban, it is not at all clear that the isolated elements will be identical or determinately mapped to the logical elements. From the point of view of a loglang, they are also a problem for it is with them that the greatest amount of apparent parsley comes up. While RHE markers can be dropped with wild abandon, some cannot --- and every one that is not a step away from concision (and back. alas, toward the the state in actual predicate logic, which puts EVERYTHING in, one way or another). So, in one sense, the first step toward a good loglang is to improve FOL++ in the concision direction, toward combinatorics, say (not that that always is either concise nor clear).

I do think there can be incremental improvements within Lojban toward a viable spoken FOL, guaranteed accurate, and not so prolix as to be unusable (people do use German after all, when English is available -- and Chinese).

From: And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Friday, July 6, 2012 3:45 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Is there any demand for LoCCan3?

John E Clifford, On 03/07/2012 17:36:
> & has been missing a while, so his ideas are not in the current files. They were iirc mainly technical and philosophic, so not (as) relevant to structural questions. (I hope this remark is inaccurate enough to get & to reenter the lists.)

Okay. So I'll address Gleki's question about "Is there any demand for LoCCan3", and also this, because Jonathan could equally well have asked the same question of me:
Jonathan Jones, On 01/07/2012 22:59:
> John, I was wondering. It seems to me that you rarely contribute
> anything to the community, and when you do, it is usually to
> criticize, to point out what you perceive to be flaws in Lojban. You
> also frequently express your opinion as to the need for a LoCCan3, as
> you put it. From my experience, it seems that you don't like Lojban.
>
> Now, I may be wrong about all of this, and I wouldn't be surprised if
> you contribute(d) a great deal that I'm unaware of. But assuming the
> above is true, and these are your feelings, why are you hear? I am
> truly curious to know why you maintain a presence in something it
> seems you not only do not care about, but apparently actively
> dislike, especially given your recent comment about being unable to
> keep a straight face in discussing Lojban.

I have for decades (more than two, not quite three, so far -- i.e. all my adult life) been very interested in the idea of there existing a certain sort of loglang and of this loglang being available to the world for use. I think it would be a boon for the world to have recourse to an ergonomically usable unambiguous language. Not everybody interested in Loglan--Lojban is interested in any sort of loglang, but it does seem as though quite a few people involved in Loglan--Lojban have been interested in a loglang, and also as though many of those interested in loglangs, especially ones with a community of sponsors, gravitate towards Loglan--Lojban.

I define a loglang as one that can unambiguously encode any explicit predicate logic formula in a way that is no less concise than the way natlangs would express the formula (with much greater ambiguity and leaving much more to be glorked from context). The relevance of the concision requirement is firstly that without it, the gain in clarity is not necessarily worth the effort of greater verbosity; rather, the goal is to up the clarity-to-verbosity ratio. And secondly, designing a language that can unambiguously encode any explicit predicate logic formula is trivially easy; it's only the concision requirement that makes the challenge difficult (or maybe impossible). Not everybody defines their sought-for loglang by these criteria. For example, John Clifford and Martin Bays are very preoccupied with having a highly specified semantics for the loglang, which is something I'm rather unsympathetic to.

Considered *as a loglang (in my definition of that term)*, Lojban is a complete failure, though it must be borne in mind that it wasn't fundamentally designed to be a loglang; the loglang aspect is more part of its (undeserved) reputation than its essence. (I should clarify that, once the BPFK does its work, which basically involves Robin wielding the political muscle and Xorxes wielding the intellectual muscle, Lojban would succeed in being logically unambiguous. The failure is to meet the (never aimed-for) criterion of concision.) (I should also note that Lojban has been a success relative to the goals of the founders of Lojban, namely to create a public-domain stable "finished" version of Loglan around which a community of users can grow.)

I'm here (on this list) partly because I've been part of the community for over 20 years, and at certain times have been the most active participant, so I feel a sense of (always marginalized) belonging. But also I'm here because I think there's a chance of a genuine loglang coupled with a community of sponsors emerging from the Loglan--Lojban community. There might come a time when enough folk that think as I do have gravitated hither that some sort of critical mass is formed and work on an ergonomically usable loglang is begun.

It's easy to think of ways of drastically improving on the Lojban design. For example, discard rafsi, make all gismu CCV -- becomes conciser and easier to learn in one go. Or discard almost all selmaho, default to Polish notation syntax, and you have something much conciser, much more easy to learn, much more easy to parse. I suppose that even these changes are so drastic that they'd amount to discarding the current Loglan--Lojban entirely and starting over, but I think a complete redesign is anyway necessary because of the one fundamental design challenge of a loglang, which is the challenge of representing where two argument-places have the same value (e.g. in "John laughed and sneezed", where the argument-place of John(), of Laugh() and of Sneeze() have the same value): specifically, the challenge is to represent that in a concise and human-usable way (bearing in mind that a normal sentence might involve dozens of groups of argument-places that have the same value). You c
ould call this loglang "LoCCan3", but, unlike John Clifford's vision, it couldn't be achieved by incremental revisions to LoCCan2.

--And.

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