Re: [lojban] What are the official goals of lojban?

Why does a language have to have "goals"?

My goal with lojban (unlike Loglan) is to not have people ask what its goals are. Clearly it has failed this goal.

</flippancy>

But seriously, my question above stands. You seem to think it is crucial that a language has goals, (mostly because you said "I think it is an important question deserving of one. Officially, what are the goals of lojban?") But I don't think a language need have any goals (other than perhaps the goal that it is able to be the means of communication between at least two entities, human or otherwise).

--gejyspa

On Sun, Jul 6, 2014 at 9:38 AM, Andrew Browne <dersaidin@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wednesday, June 25, 2014 10:19:06 PM UTC+10, la gleki wrote:

Hm, i can't see syntactic unambiguity in the list of your goals.

I stated what I think/hope/expect the terminal goal of lojban to be:

The goal of lojban is to be a usable language which enhances thought.

- maximize facility for logical thought: clear, sound, consistent reasoning

- minimize limitations on thought

I did mention ambiguity as something to minimize:

- ambiguity is a limitation on clarity

I may have missed other instrumental goals.

Does this mean lojban aims not only for syntactic but for semantic unambiguity as well?

I did not differentiate between syntactic and semantic ambiguity, I think both are to be minimized.

Does lojban have a goal of a semantic regularization and if yes then to what extent? I can see that e.g. the place structure of words for animals is more or less homogeneous.

I would say yes, as this is an aspect of being logical - something to be maximized:
- consistency and regularity is logical

To what extent? I'm not sure.
I guess as much as possible, until the increasing it reduces the overall utility function we're trying to maximize (which, at this point, might include stuff like backwards compatibility).

Does Lojban aims for being a metalanguage in future machine translation applications?
Does this eventually mean it is supposed to be an auxiliary language in that you write in Lojban, and your text is automatically translated into high quality texts in other languages?

My interpretation of some of the sources in my first post (namely the "Loglan 1"; 1.5, 1.6, 1.7) is that these nice features would be probable consequences of the language design choices.

I don't think these need to be goals to emerge as features, but having them considered as low priority secondary goals may improve those features.

The original question is still open. Officially, what are the goals of lojban?

Thanks,

Andrew / DerSaidin

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