From lojbab@xxxxxx.xxxx Thu Dec 30 02:16:22 1999 X-Digest-Num: 323 Message-ID: <44114.323.1762.959273825@eGroups.com> Date: Thu, 30 Dec 1999 05:16:22 -0500 From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" My response to the Top-Down idea of IAL or Lojban adoption >is to wonder why it should be a good thing for the adopting >body? Take the European patent organization: it would be >a trivial task to develop a language that shares Lojban's >virtues of nonambiguity and other areas of suitability to >the formulation of patents but is much simpler and easier >to learn; Really? If it were so easy, why haven't they done so? Personally, I don't think you can get much simpler than Lojban and still do the job. The primary extraneous feature of Lojban not applicable to patents is the attitudinal/evidential system. Even audible unambiguity has some value. > logicians have been using such languages for decades. 1) What language have logicians used that could be used for writing a patent description? Key here is "description", and description takes meaningful content words. Patents include both things and processes, and both have to be describable, hence tanru and description sumti both requiring content words and both capable of being disambiguated semantically to an arbitrary degree of specificity as well as grammatically. 2. The language of logic that most people have seen is the predicate calculus. Being a reasonably bright sort of guy who struggled to barely pass a self-paced college level course in the stuff, I daresay that many would call the predicate calculus easy to learn. Computer languages that include logic come closer to the mark, but they also lack content words. > Likewise for an IAL; if the EU did decide it >would be economically advantageous (tho I think it wouldn't), >for what reason (other than idiocy) would it opt for the >halfarsed candidate IALs currently on the market? If it were easy to develop a better one, I am sure that people would have done so already. It isn't merely money that is lacking (though money would be nice) - Interlingua had money backing it, and of course DLTs machine translation internal interlanguage based on Esperanto had money backing it. A language sufficient to do the job will have to be sufficiently complex, and G-d knows that balancing complexity vs. needed features is far from easy. Then there is the key advantage of an existing language in that there are people who already know it and who therefore can serve as teachers, already written teaching materials that people can learn the language from without teachers if necessary. It took 3 years of teaching material development to get Lojban to the point that Nick Nicholas could teach himself the language from the materials and be able to write cogent Lojban without a lot of coaching, and it took him a few more years of work before he felt himself skilled at the language. Only with the advent of the Book have we had significant numbers able to teach themselves Lojban, and a goodly number have said that even that is not sufficient for them. Going from raw language concept to the Book is dozens of person-years of effort. Going from there to even the current level of Lojban prowess is many more person-years of effort on the part of self-teachers. And we don't yet have enough to teach the European patent community (hence by initiation of this thread), much less the rest of Europe. There is a likelihood that Esperanto could come up with the needed teachers reasonably quickly, especially given that for many it would their first chance to make money using the language (which can be a strong motivating force for many who have half-learned Esperanto, probably including a goodly portion of this list). >In my view, the Bottom-Up approach is the only viable one >for Lojban and currently extant IALs. But is the bottom-up approach viable at all? I think that it is a necessary step - necessary to build the infrastructure of teachers and teaching materials and lexicon, but the key problme of bottom-up is achieving any sort of critical mass. Lojban has probably achieved critical mass enough to survive it inventors (which makes it one of the most select of conlangs), but not necessarily enough to gain a respectable "market share" among the languages of the world. (I think Lojban has the advantage that it needs a lot smaller number than other conlangs to achieve critical mass, because Lojban unlike most conlangs DOES have the sort of specialty application like patent law and computer-communications that is economically viable with only a small fraction of the world learning it. And economic viability is the key to "top down" - a top down approach will work when someone with power sees a way to make money using the language. > The only hope for >Lojban to succeed Top-Downly is that some organization is >intelligent enough to see the merits of adopting a logical >language, but stupid enough to choose Lojban to do the job. Gee, thanks. %^) >(This isn't an attack on Lojban. Lojban is more complex >than it needs to be for limited, formal, written applications >because it needs also to be usable for the full range of >linguistic functions. What linguistic functions other than attitudinals are not needed for patent work? More importantly, how much simpler could a language optimally designed for a limited purpose be than a Lojban subset that simply omits those features not needed. After all, a large portion of the Loglan/Lojban concept is optionality of features. > (I still think it's unnecessarily complex grammatically even given that, > but that's not my point.)) And of course you yourself have tried to come up with an alternative, and apparently found it not all that easy. Jim Carter tried for something simpler and more algorithmic, and likewise made several false starts before coming up with something that few even try to learn. Again, if it were so easy to do much better than Lojban, why hasn't anyone even come close? lojbab ---- lojbab ***NOTE NEW ADDRESS*** lojbab@lojban.org Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: see Lojban WWW Server: href=" http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban/ " Order _The Complete Lojban Language_ - see our Web pages or ask me.