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[lojban] Why Lojban fails



This seems like a good time for the sorta annual reminder thaat Lojban as currently constituted is doomed to fail of its intended goals.  The reason is simply that it is built upside down, so the proofs all have to run up hill.  This pattern was set by JCB on day one, when he decided to work by adding logic to a speakable langauge (English), rather than extracting a speakable language from loigc (not FOPL, the then favorite, but, as should have been obvious already in the early days of Loglan, what is now called Higher Order Intensional Logic (HOIL)).  We know this can be done because it is a given in (certain, e.g. Montague’s) linguistic theories that that is how languages actually come about.
Ordinary languages derive sentences from formulae (as it were) by a variety of transformation in a variety of orders, with the result that a given senence may be traceable back through various histories to very different original formuale, amphiboly.  The task of constructing a Loglan, then, is to find a set of transformations and ordering rules which is at every step unique, such that, at each step, the products involved are traceable back to a single form in each case.  In tthis way, the monoparsing of the original formula is inherited by the final sentence.  Working the other way, the best to be hoped for is successive approximations to the goal but nevr a guarantee that you have actually succeeded (even if you have).  
By now, if yoou have been paying attention as you went along, you should know wnough about HOIL (however you think about it) and about transformation and order rules to have a good start of a right side up project.  Turning your attention to that would be a much better use of your time than correcting minor footnotes in CLL.2 or whatever.

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