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

Well, UN officially, as before, if you do not insist on monoparsing, any other goals you have for Lojban (etc) can be achieved more simply. Semantic unambiguity is a mirage, a goal that will always recede as you approach it and perfect precision requires infinite _expression_ (and still misses). The suggestions about improved thinking and creativity ascribe to a language powers it does not have (not to mention the probability that the two constantly interfere with one another). A usable language is easy to obtain (there are thousands available), any language can facilitate clear thinking and creativity, just just have to use it rightly (imitating formal logic is not generally such a use). Ambiguity is a limitatyion on clarity (sometimes) but often a stimulus to creativity. And so on. Monoparsing is an achievable and testable goal; all the others are either impossible or merely subjective. Or far to easy to achieve to be interesting.

On Sunday, July 6, 2014 8:38 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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