Subject: Re: [lojban] Fwd: AUXLANG Digest - 11 Nov 2001 to 12 Nov 2001 (#2001-260)

From: Logical Language Group <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2001 12:28:03 -0500

At 04:59 PM 11/14/01 +0000, And Rosta wrote:
> >>> "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]> 11/13/01 11:22pm
>#For everyone's pleasure, from Auxlang list, here are 6 sentences to provide
>#Lojban for. Since the topic is concision in language, I would be
>#interested not only in the traditional rendering (which for 1) might be "le
>#barda zdani pu culno loi cukta" but some concise form that conveys the
>#meaning accurately but may not mimic the English grammar ("pu cukta 
>#culno ke barda zdani".
>
>Most of the translations are SAE relexes. It makes little sense to compare 
>them with Lojban.

Precisely why I WANT to do so. To point out that their idea of an 
international language is limited to Euroclones that are not well thought 
out in the really tricky issues.

> You could have a competition for the concisest SAE
>relex, or for which language can express a predetermined body of 
>information most concisely, but the actual exercise you quoted is rather
>pointless.

I agree. But the way I wanted to show that the game was foolish required 
that I first play the game.

>#Also if someone can make a list of the troublesome sentences that And
>#and others have plagued us with for semantics issues, I may pass them
>#along to Auxlang to see what others do with them. (Ceqli in particular
>#purports to be a loglang but Rex May almost certainly has considered
>#these kinds of issues even less than JCB did.)
>
>If those Auxlangers were interested in my troublesome sentences they'd
>probably be here on this list. If you give them a tricky sentence, they'll 
>just
>translate it into SAE and thence into their pet auxlang, and nobody will 
>learn anything.

Ah, but do all of your tricky sentences get resolved the same way in the 
various SAE languages. If not, then different SAE speakers might translate 
the tricky sentence differently into an auxlang, leading to precisely the 
sort of miscommunication that you presumably intended to point up in posing 
the sentences.

I've already done this weakly for auxlangs by pointing out that the natlang 
meanings of the words translated as English "morning" and "arm" are not 
semantically equivalent, and asked what the definition in Esperanto of its 
word for morning is. I've never gotten a satisfactory answer. But your 
tricky questions go deeper in that they show a weakness of the European 
language structure.

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org