Re: [lojban] Mathy person interested in concept, unsure where to begin.

No, the worry is the opposite: whether every sentence of Lojban has a unique (up to equivalence, say) representation in logic which can be automatically derived. Your project is indeed trivial until you throw in all the qualifiers: colloquial, compact, ergonomic (I have no idea what that means for a sentence, but it seems popular these days), unambiguous, etc. Then we clearly need a full set (whatever tat means -- enough for all the cases we know of or can think of, I suppose) of transformations, not just the "read it as written" (with a few easy additons) version that is trivial. By way of connecting all this up, the formula derived from a sentence is the same (up to equivalence, of course -- but maybe not even with that condition) as the formula from which the sentence is derived. That is the test of the logicality of the language.

On Wednesday, September 24, 2014 11:47 AM, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Sep 24, 2014 at 1:01 PM, 'John E Clifford' via lojban <lojban@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Both attitudinals and vocatives (and Gricean operators and evidentials and just about anything else I can think of) have places in the extended logics that comprise appropriate bases, so those are not problems.

If those extended logics use the same formalism of FOPL, then their formulas can be directly and automatically translated into Lojban (but without using Lojban's "shortcuts", of course). If they each use a different particular syntax, then they may not have an automatic translation into Lojban, or at least each case would have to be analysed separately to see how it can be accommodated. I don't think it's reasonable to expect Lojban to automatically translate every formalism ever used though.

It is pretty easy -- in theory. Working out the practical details is the bitch. But I suspect the real reason it has not been done is that no one has until recently been very explicit about what needs to be done, the whole having been expressed in vague generalities rather than (slightly) more specific programs. Score a point or two for the radical revisionists.

A lot of work needs to be done to explain how Lojban's "shortcuts", and its "bells and whistles", translate into something that can be called "logical". If that's what you're saying, I agree. What I thought you were saying, but perhaps you were not, is that you had doubts that Lojban would have any trouble expressing FOPL. That part is trivial.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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