Subject: Sophisticated Lojban (was: Meaningless talk)

From: Invent Yourself <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2001 01:30:37 -0500 (EST)

On Thu, 1 Mar 2001 [email-masked] wrote:

> In a message dated 3/1/2001 6:11:46 PM Central Standard Time,
> [email-masked] writes:
>
>
> > >.i su'a nandu fa le za'i traji ke smuni kakne sepi'o la lojban
> >
> > i ie li'a i ma'a za'o na certu le bangu
> >
> Not that I can take my own advice, but, after slogging through this thread
> today, even with considerable mechanical help (the MSDOS jbofihe just can't
> take it but the accompanying glosser is very handy), I would recommend that
> we all (or most of us anyhow) go back to "See Spot run" and work our way up
> very slowly before
> we get around to doing to philosophical or linguistic discussions in Lojban.

I agree with Jorge. I think we've had decades of See Spot Run, and thus
set enough groundwork to be able to stumble forth, making mistakes
and faltering but ultimately exploring what Lojban can really do. Let's
get this baby out of the driveway and take it for a joyride!

> There was scarcely a line in all this free from grammatical or intentional or
> vocabulary errors, which makes it very hard to read -- especially if you miss
> one of the intentional errors and so get off on the wrong notion of what was
> meant or guess the wrong correction for a word. Lojban has almost zip
> redundancy, so each little error adds incrementally to a total mess.

I've seen a mistake or two from Jorge, but I was able to correct for them
almost immediately, and they caused me no difficulty after reading the
sentence a second time.

Jorge and I are largely understanding each other. This is why reading by
sight is really better than jbofi'e. There will "always" be a level of
human thinking, of creative interpretation and analogy, which software just
can't do. Language that is dry enough to lack any of this probably can't
express very much. It could only make assertions about a tiny subset of
reality, like the notation that describes chess moves.

As an aside, it seems that some people think Lojban's unambiguity means
it should be a dry, humorless, soul-less high-level markup language. But
my own experiences with Lojban show me this was not the intention of an
influential enough faction of the language designers. I prefer to use the
logical clarity to improve my ability to launch polemical expeditions, not
to restrict my expression down to the assertion of tautological
mathematical formulae. If this statement runs contrary to previous
statements of mine, it is because I am in fact exploring the powers of
language. I find it is rather like a car; taking me far but imprisoning me
during the journey.

> >From my point of view -- but that is about my vocabulary and my own writing
> style -- a good move would be to drop all the attitudinals and discursives
> for a while. They do clutter the message and they seem to get misused more
> often that content words (and are also the tightest piece of the vocabulary,
> small error make huge differences). They are semantic ciphers, so nothing
> will be lost (and some folk may be forced to actually use the brivla that
> they mean when they use them). Oh, throw in the non-spatiotemporal tenses
> and most of the connectives while you're about it.

I think we're finding these other words provide context for us, resulting
in improved interpretation. I would find a reduced subset more difficult
to understand.

Rather than us simplifying our dialogue, I earnestly invite all of you to
join in, in Lojban! Don't be afraid or ashamed to stumble or ask simple
questions.

-----
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