From lojbab@xxxxxx.xxxx Thu Dec 30 23:37:57 1999 X-Digest-Num: 324 Message-ID: <44114.324.1766.959273825@eGroups.com> Date: Fri, 31 Dec 1999 02:37:57 -0500 From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" > From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" > > At 04:09 PM 12/29/99 +0000, And Rosta wrote: > > >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? > >Either because they haven't perceived the need or because some >cost/benefit analysis doesn't justify it. > > > 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. > >There is nothing relevant that Lojban can do that standard >predicate logic notation can't. It can be spoken and written (unambiguously), and it is languagy enough that someone can learn it as a language (I doubt that many can learn predicate logic as a language). By this argument, the efforts to develop an interlanguage for machine translation would need only use predicate calculus. But instead the closest that anyone has come to successfully using an interlanguage was the DLT project that used Esperanto. > In a Polish/Reverse Polish predicate >logic notation you need nothing but predicates, variables, >one or two quantifiers and two or three connectives. In other >words, setting aside how variables are handled, you could have >a language with only 3 cmavo! I'll admit that that number might >be expanded a bit, e.g. to include numbers, but even an expanded >cmavo inventory would be only a tiny proportion of Lojban's. >Likewise, the entire syntax could be formulated in a single >sentence. But could human beings use it to describe a patent? And what happens when you need to translate an indirect question? After all, haven't you just found that it is a fairly intractible problem for predicate logic? > > > 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. > >Of course the predicate words' senses have to be defined. But in Lojban the >predicate words' senses are not defined -- this task has been left to >'usage' to achieve. And patent translation would be a large amount of usage. > > 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. > >Is that irony? No, a typo. Substitute few for many. > If so, I guess that they problem with predicate calculus is >that there's no fudgeability with it, which nonfudgeability is exactly why >one wants a logical language. But fudgeability is fine for patent translation (maybe even desirable to the lawyers), so long as the fudguing does not create an ambiguity comparable to those of natlangs. > Note also that predicate logic is a subset >of Lojban, so if you learn Lojban you learn predicate logic plus a load >of extra stuff. You learn the forms of predicate logic, more or less (but how many people actually use the full set of Lojban logical connectives, for example?). But you do not learn to reason according to the rules of inference along the lines of the predicate calculus. If you did learn this inherently while learning Lojban without having to study the subject, I daresay that the original SWH concept for Loglan will have been proven. I also think that a lot of that "extra stuff" is exactly the sort of thing needed for patents, technical writing, formal specification, etc. Again, the attempts I know of anguages for these arenas have tended to have some logical construct to them, but have always had to fall back on a natlang like form. If not enough like a natlang, they haven't been learnable; if too much like a natlang, they haven't been sufficiently unambiguous. > > > 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. > >Why? Most of the people who invent IALs are total lunatics, and most of the >rest are either ignorant or dim. But there is a market for an unambiguous specification language, which is what we are talking about. It would be usable in the computer industry for software development, security verification, proof of program correctness. They were trying to solve the problem when I was still working on that kind of stuff in the mid-80s, and I have not heard that the problem has been solved. They invent computer-languages to try to do this kind of thing, but they never catch on as a standard, probably because you can't speak LISP. But you CAN now "speak PROLOG", given the known mapping from a Lojban subset to PROLOG. > > 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). > >I'm not sure what point you're making. The point is that any top-down application of an artificial language big enough to point the way to large scale usage will inherently require that the language be easy to learn, with sufficient language learning materials that many can learn it by self-study and most anyone with more than minimal verbal ability can learn it with a teacher. The latter will of course take sufficient skilled Lojbanists to serve as teachers. In short it is the "rapid bootstrap" problem that anything really new tends to have a steep and time-expensive learning curve. We have to reduce that steepness to make Lojban successful. > I agree that there are these >obstacles to the adoption of Lojban. And as I've said, I think Lojban >and Esperanto would be poor choices for a patent language, or for a >European IAL. As a patent language it has to go beyond pan-European. Our German proponent of the Lojban patent effort cited the difficulty of translating Japanese patents as a strong reason in Lojban's favor. > > >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. > >I've never believed Lojban to be viable in the sense that you mean, and >have no burning desire to assist it to become viable. I understand. But I raised the topic in order to find out if there are ways to overcome the viability issues provided that the application shows up. You may not be interested in the possibility, but it is certain that many others are. > > Lojban has probably achieved critical mass enough to survive it > > inventors (which makes it one of the most select of conlangs), > >I am certain this is so. There's now the Book, which contains pretty >much all there is to know about the language, and I imagine it will >always attract small numbers of people who find Lojban appealing. > > > 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. > >I very much doubt that this will happen, though it happening is Lojban's >only real hope for achieving critical mass. Yes. >But at any rate, I don't see why you should care so much. I recognize that >you've decided that the validation for all the efforts you've invested in >Lojban is the creation of a living language rather than just a language, >but I don't understand why you should make that the validation, especially >when it's so improbable. I see it as my job as President of LLG to work towards the goals of all Lojbanists, including some that you may feel are less practical. I got into this project out of a sense of duty, which later expanded to become a sense of mission. There are people who want to seriously work on finding applications for Lojban. I need to make sure that LLG provides the resources needed to make such efforts realizable, regardless of whether the goals that the efforts are aiming at will be achieved. The best thing I can do is to make it so that when people try to promote Lojban for a top-down goal, that there is enough substance backing them that they do not seem foolish just for trying. And if I do that, real money might "happen", since venture capitalists these days are betting on a lot of things with even slimmer odds for success than Lojban. > And the original idea that a loglan-speaking >community would test sapirwhorf, I've always regarded as a bit of blarney >baloney by JC Brown who really wanted to invent a language but was trying to >(a) gain respectability for an ill-respected activity, (b) differentiate >the product from others, (c) attract adherents. I know the history enough to be sure that it was not blarney at the time. Remember that in the mid-50s, testing SWH was a big deal. Remember also that JCB came from the Campbell school of science fiction which I think had a certain amount of SWH built into it. He does seem to have conceived of Loglan before the SWH became big, but I think that he seriously wanted to make the language a research tool. > > > 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. %^) > >What I mean is this. First, the overriding goal of the Lojban project was >always to get a minimally adequate product out into the world. The policy >was "if it's not broken, don't fix it". But if you're an organization that >is so dissatisfied with existing natural languages that you want to >adopt a logical language, you're probably an organization that wants the >language to be as good as is practicable. Secondly, and more importantly, >Lojban was designed as a compromise between many different goals. It is >probable that an organization adopting a logical language would have >different and fewer goals, and that Lojban would be a relatively poor >solution for these goals. I agree up to a point. But that point is the realization that the development of a language superior to Lojban for a more focussed problem would be at least as big an effort as has gone into Loglan/Lojban, but on a shorter timescale. And that is too much to be feasible. Furthermore, a redevelopment would almost certain be attempted as a proprietary effort because of the needed investment, and I think TLI Loglan and DLT both demonstrated the folly of trying to make a proprietary artificial language. Lojban's strength has been the diverse breadth of input that has gone into the language. The question is whether Lojban, or a subset thereof is "good enough" for some application. I think it is. Time will tell. We certainly have the creative and bright minds needed to find such applications that exist. >I suppose that once one organization used Lojban, that would then become >a reason in itself for other organizations to use it too. But I really >can't see it being a sensible decision for any organization to adopt it >otherwise. True, it already exists, so would save labour in concocting >an alternative language, but if you're going to invest so much in getting >your organization to use it, a redesign would probably save you cost >in the long run. Therefore we have to make the investment for an organization small compared to the alternatives. I think we can. Having a public domain language is a good start. >I'm not hostile to Lojban. If the United Nations decided to choose a >language to be a global general purpose second language, and if I >had a vote, then if the choice had to be made from an existing language >then I would vote for Lojban. And even if there was the option of >designing a new language I would vote for Lojban to avoid the risk >of the designed language being worse than Lojban. %^) > > >(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? > >Lojban is designed to be general purpose, flexible, nonconstraining, >culturally neutral, etc. etc. The only two of its goals necessary >for patent work are logicality and nonambiguity. Culturally neutral is a biggy. Nonconstraining and flexible are probably important, because patent writeups in various natlangs to be translated into Lojban will have their own natlang style and idiosyncrasies. And patent writeups tend to use very complicated language structures. > > 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. > >If you pared Lojban down to the smallest adequate portion you'd still >be left with unnecessary stuff (e.g. zo'u, terminators) and what remained >would be Lojban only in as much as that unnecessary stuff would remain >and that the vocabulary items would be Lojban. And the vocabulary items >being Lojban would be a positively unnecessary hindrance to efficient >use of the language. It would be much easier for all concerned to use >a posteriori European vocabulary. In other words "Anglan". > > Again, if it were so easy to do much better than Lojban, why hasn't anyone > > even come close? > >First, it is not so easy to do better than Lojban if you have the same goals >as Lojban. It is easier to do better than Lojban only if you have a more >restricted set of goals. Second, if it is possible to do better than Lojban, >with the same set of goals, this is largely because it is possible to learn >from Lojban's 'mistakes', i.e. it is by standing on Lojban's shoulders that >Lojban can be bettered. Third, even if it were easy to improve upon Lojban's >design, there remains the matter of the huge amount of labour necessary to >get any language to the level of completion that Lojban has attained. #3 is a biggie. >Also, in a certain sense, it has been proved that it is easy to do better >than Lojban, because over the years people have often proposed valid >improvements that were not adopted (on the grounds that completion was >a more important goal than improvement). It is not clear that the various proposals were mutually compatible and workable; lots of things sound nice till you have to make them work in usage. As it is, Lojban suffered from "bells and whistles syndrome" as we hung new features on because they were easy and did not conflict with the past. There was also a 4-5 year period at the beginning when improvement was still considered, so long as certain basics were not lightly challenged. Nick and Cowan came in right at the end of that period, and in fact may have ended it simply by being able to do what they then did with the language. 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.