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Re: [lojban] Re: CLL and modern Lojban





On Sat, Nov 11, 2017 at 9:57 AM, 'John E Clifford' via lojban <lojban@googlegroups.com> wrote:

JCB ditched most of the features of FOPL (the best then available) which gave for precision and most of the last 60 years has been spent trying to get at least some of that back (not yet all by a long shot).  Lojban is just an SAE language that looks a little strange because position in a sentence does not have a fixed meaning but rather depends upon the verb at the center.  End of borrowings from logic (hyperbole, but not much).

Thanks. I am interested in learning more about the history.  What FOL features did JCB ditch?  

In my view, the "skeleton" of Loglan looks like the result of tacking phonological forms onto FOL in what at the time must have seemed like the most obvious and straightforward manner, before the arrival of formal semantics.  After that, there came the business of trying to give Loglan the expressiveness of natural languages, which surely necessitated extending Loglan's grammar far beyond what could be represented in standard FOL, which was done in various ad-hoc ways.  All the while -- as I perceive it when I read some of JCB's writings -- there was evidently a preoccupation with the notion that Loglan could be used in a scientific research project to test the SWH, and the prospect of winning grant money for such a project.  I don't suspect this preoccupation with SWH served the cause of Loglan's logicalness very well. (Arguably, the time spent on mulling SWH could have been better spent on studying the work of formal semantics which was emerging in the 1980s.) 

But of course, I wasn't actually there, so what I say is merely my impression of the result and of the writings left behind.  As a side note, I don't see Lojban as being much like an SAE at all.  Real SAE conlangs look like Esperanto, and even more so, like IALA Interlingua.  Lojban is *sui generis*, IMO.

mi'e .maik.

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