Re: [lojban] Logos Initiative

["'John E Clifford' via lojban" <lojban@googlegroups.com>]

Yup, the old Logjam trick of misusing technical terms (or, to be fair, using terms you don't know the meaning of in the first place).  

"Logical language" does have a number of uses and Lojban fails in just about all of them (including "having a bsic grammar based on symbolic logic", though it comes closest to this one). As usual, what I mean is a language in which every utterance is traceable to a unique representation in a suitable logic formalism, which representation correctly gives the meaning of the utterance, and is reached from the linguistic form by automatic formal rules (parsing).  Lojban has several known shortcomings in this respect and no one has ever actually attempted to build the appropriate parser-transformer so there may be (almost surely are) many more to deal with.  The point is that Lojban has done a lot of the work and the rest is probably doable, maybe even without scrapping the baroque trappings that Lojban (following Loglan largely) thought necessary because of the clunky notions of parsers they were working with.  Of course, starting from scratch, with more rational parsing devices and a clearer sense of what was going on (Logjam goals have changed several times, losing little from discarded goals and just slapping on what was needed for the new goal) we could probably eventually achieve a much trimmer langauge, one which, perhaps, even looked a bit like a logical language on the surface.  But not in my lifetime at my most optimistic.

On Tuesday, September 23, 2014 11:43 AM, Pierre Abbat <phma@bezitopo.org> wrote:

On Tuesday, September 23, 2014 20:12:23 Gleki Arxokuna wrote:
> 2014-09-23 16:58 GMT+04:00 'John E Clifford' via lojban <
>
> lojban@googlegroups.com>:
> > Losing the thread here.  But
> > English is a tonal language?
>
> yes, say aloud this last phrase and hear the tone.

A tonal language is one in which changing the tone of a word turns it into a
different word. English has words in which changing which syllable is stressed
turns them into different words (e.g. entrance), but no words in which changing
the tone turns them into different words.

Pierre
--
li ze te'a ci vu'u ci bi'e te'a mu du
li ci su'i ze te'a mu bi'e vu'u ci

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