Subject: [lojban] Re: modularity & grammar (was: RE: Re: nai in UI (was: BPFK phpbb)

From: Robert LeChevalier <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 06 May 2003 08:24:13 -0400

At 12:36 PM 5/6/03 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
> > Not to say that every natlang conforms
> > perfectly to this ideal, but even English comes pretty close. The Lojban
> > grammar was created to refer to meaning only at the level of the syntactic
> > category of the various words, and I think that design principle should
> > remain unchanged
>
>To me it seems like a gang of computer programmers were let loose on
>designing a language.

In fact this is what happened in Lojban, but the complaint is invalid 
because the bulk of the language was designed by JCB, who was not much more 
computer literate than others of his generation, and was done by hand 
without a computer.

The formalization of the grammar as a set of rules WAS done by programmers, 
but JCB started with a corpus of grammatical-by-definition sentences with 
parse structures that he defined, and told the programmers to devise rules 
that would create the desired parse. Only minor changes were made in the 
corpus over the years other than to expand it. But from 1976 to 1983 or 
so, TLI Loglan was defined by the corpus rather than by the YACC rules for 
that corpus.

>But think back to the very beginnings of Loglan
>when briefly it literally was (so I am told) speakable predicate logic.

It never was. That may have been the concept, but IIRC, even the examples 
in the 1960 Scientific American article fell short of this, and the 
language was hardly speakable at that point. (JCB described it as 
"rattling around in people's brains" - it was too bare a structure to be 
able to say anything other than exact analogs of the few examples.)

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

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From: Robert LeChevalier <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 06 May 2003 08:24:13 -0400

lojbab