Subject: Re: [humanmarkup] Lojban personal experience

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2001 09:41:25 -0500

Ranjeeth Kumar Thunga wrote:

> I would 
> like to know what your *personal* experience has been in the following:
> 
> What aspects of miscommunication do not exist in lojban?

Well, this answer is "official" rather than truly personal, as I
am not fluent in Lojban; far less fluent than other members of
Lojban list.

But in general, *syntactic* ambiguities do not exist in Lojban.
There are no sentences that look/sound the same but differ in meaning
(no perfect puns, among other things), and there are no sentences
that can be parsed in more than one way. Lojban shares this property
with computer languages.

Semantic ambiguity does exist in Lojban, but is limited to a few
areas, the most obvious of which are:

1)	names (the referent of a name depends who's using it);
2)	compounds (the exact significance of a compound word cannot
be determined for certain; compound words are terse rather
than semantically precise);

> How much easier it is to understand the other person?
> 
> What aspects of miscommunication still do exist?

-- 
There is / one art || John Cowan <[email-masked]>
no more / no less || http://www.reutershealth.com
to do / all things || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
with art- / lessness \\ -- Piet Hein