From jcowan@reutershealth.com Fri Mar 23 06:38:38 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: jcowan@reutershealth.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_0_4); 23 Mar 2001 14:38:38 -0000 Received: (qmail 62826 invoked from network); 23 Mar 2001 14:38:37 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by l9.egroups.com with QMQP; 23 Mar 2001 14:38:37 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail.reutershealth.com) (204.243.9.36) by mta2 with SMTP; 23 Mar 2001 14:38:37 -0000 Received: from reutershealth.com (IDENT:cowan@[192.168.3.11]) by mail.reutershealth.com (Pro-8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id JAA21282; Fri, 23 Mar 2001 09:41:15 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <3ABB6095.8050509@reutershealth.com> Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2001 09:41:25 -0500 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux 2.2.16-22 i686; en-US; 0.8) Gecko/20010215 X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: humanmarkup@yahoogroups.com Cc: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [humanmarkup] Lojban personal experience References: <004001c0b28c$4848f3c0$6cda0241@cc472501a> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: John Cowan 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 no more / no less || http://www.reutershealth.com to do / all things || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan with art- / lessness \\ -- Piet Hein