Subject: Logic and the Logical Language

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2001 14:15:29 EDT

Just a reminder, before we get too loud about Lojbab's position, that the 
only official sense in which Lojban is a logical language is that its 
underlying grammar is based upon that of applied first order predicate logic 
and that, in those few and far between portions where that grammar is 
strictly adhered to, the rules of that language apply (see especially {ganai 
... gi}). 
Starting from that, one and another of us have run off -- and on -- in 
various directions, insisting that Lojban had to be logical here or there 
or... . Not so. Lojban's only requirement beyond the basic ones is to be a 
speakable human language -- not, by the latest surveys, a paradigm for 
logicality. To be sure, geeks that we all are, we would like it to be as 
clear and concise and argumentatively transparent as possible, and we would 
like to extend its grammatical ambiguity freedom as far as possible into the 
semantic realm and even the pragmatic. These efforts, if they pay off in 
better usage, greater clarity, fresh insights, and so on, are always welcome 
(or should be -- I think Lojbab overlooks their fruits occasionally for 
rhetorical purposes). But they are not necessary for Lojban in the way that 
good Lojban usage is. Of course, they do help to define the "good" in good 
usage, but they are not definitive.