101–110 of 145 posts
I even wrote a new course for laymen https://lojban.pw/books/learn-lojban/
Needless to say, few people invest in learning new languages at all.
If you are interested you may join the discord chat
I tried it with gpt 3.5 but it doesn't seem to know lojban so well. I asked it to translate the following in to Lojban, then separately after deleting that history I asked it to translate that to English. Here's what it did: Original English: "I heard of the TinyStories research project that unlocked cognitive capabilities in LLMs with fewer parameters. I wonder if something similar would be possible with lojban?" Lo…
GPT-4 doesn't do well at it, either. The problem is that there simply isn't that much text written in Lojban, so it can't learn it the way it does other languages. You can see similar problems with other languages with a relatively small corpus, such as Old Norse.
I like the idea of Lojban. I hate the implementation. It’s basically spoken math notation for predicate logic, which falls flat well short of the goal. There are much better logical frameworks that have been developed for computational semantics (e.g. Davidsonian event semantics). Lojban’s formalism was out of date already when it was proposed as Loglan half a century ago. If there is anyone out there who likes the i…
I believe there is a variation supported by the language to use semantic predicates instead of argument order. But, since argument order is the standard approach it doesn’t much matter — I think this is the biggest flaw in the language. I was also a little disappointed to learn that it is morphologically ambiguous without proper inflection (syllabic emphasis). Other than that its an amazing language, as is Loglan. I…
I don't know if eliminating ambiguity is even possible, much less a key feature of the language. There's even prominent ambiguity on this page: > Lojban means different things to different people
The goal of Lojban is to eliminate syntactic/grammatical ambiguity: Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana. In this example, "flies" could be either a noun or verb depending on context. That sort of construct isn't possible in Lojban. Of course, it's still possible to use Lojban to express statements that have an ambiguous or unclear meaning.
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The goal of Lojban is to eliminate syntactic/grammatical ambiguity: Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana. In this example, "flies" could be either a noun or verb depending on context. That sort of construct isn't possible in Lojban. Of course, it's still possible to use Lojban to express statements that have an ambiguous or unclear meaning.
Ah, classic HN Saturday morning - finding myself dreaming up Hungarian notation in English to disambiguate grammatical types nTime vFlies avLike an nArrow, nFruit vFlies avLike a nBanana It's ugly but if we all adhere to this convention and haze our juniors, we'll eliminate most our problems
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The goal of Lojban is to eliminate syntactic/grammatical ambiguity: Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana. In this example, "flies" could be either a noun or verb depending on context. That sort of construct isn't possible in Lojban. Of course, it's still possible to use Lojban to express statements that have an ambiguous or unclear meaning.
Which is a bit ironic, because in the year 2023 it turns out that correctly parsing sentences is an easier problem to solve than extracting meaning from context, even when given a known correct parsing. Lojban solved the wrong problem.
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Ah, classic HN Saturday morning - finding myself dreaming up Hungarian notation in English to disambiguate grammatical types nTime vFlies avLike an nArrow, nFruit vFlies avLike a nBanana It's ugly but if we all adhere to this convention and haze our juniors, we'll eliminate most our problems
As someone who speaks Hungarian, but never seen Hungarian notation outside the context of programming, I'm suddenly realizing that Hungarian notation is probably named after how the Hungarian language itself works. Words in Hungarian have specific endings that change their "grammatical type" (I forget the grammatical term for that... part of speech?) Some examples: 1. "-ás/-és": Transforms a verb into a noun that den…
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> My email is in my profile. OK, I’ll email you if you want to continue this discussion elsewhere. > https://champollion.hosting.nyu.edu Looks interesting… where should I start reading? > If I am correct in this assessment, then the next logical step from a conlang/auxlang perspective is: can we build a direct, unambiguous spoken grammar for this universal semantics framework? If so, then we will have achieved what L…
Oh I'm happy to continue this conversation here, although it's late where I am and I'll be going to bed soon, and HN threads are ephemeral. Feel free to email me if you'd like to actually collaborate on this. > Looks interesting… where should I start reading? IIRC he did some graduate summer schools that were recorded online and have attached lecture notes. Those plus the referenced papers would be a good place to st…
> 1. There is no event in which Spot has ever barked, or 2. In the case of a specific event, Spot did not bark.
Or maybe even a third case:
3. There exists an event in which Spot did not bark.
English pragmatic usage would make this interpretation rare, but you could still imagine a case in which it was valid.
For example, suppose that Spot normally barks 100% of the time (and never sleeps?).
Then there is a fortunate day in which Spot only barked 70% of the time, and was quiet 30% of the time.
Someone who witnessed this might say "Spot didn't bark [today]!" to emphasize the unusual event, even though Spot did bark the majority of the time on that day.
I just mean to distinguish this from your second case because I think in the second case the "specific event" is possibly already one which is known to the listener or already under discussion.
A language humans use only in non-digital medium would be interesting. To avoid LLMs and surveillance-capitalism from knowing too much about you and your ways.
There's dozens or hundreds of them already, living in the world now. Some of them don't even have a formalized writing system.
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> the overuse of the copula "is/are" is a consistent source of mistakes whether accidental or purposeful I’m not sure I’d characterise these as ‘mistakes’, per se . They’re just a consequence of the fact that the copula is multifunctional — just like every other English word. In fact, you could similarly criticise almost any common word: ‘go’, ‘from’, ‘good’, ‘like’, ‘not’…
> the copula is multifunctional Exercise: try stating this without the copula. But no, "is/are" is not multifunctional in the same way that "from" is. If I say "she came from school" it is clear that we're talking about relative motion today or in the recent past from one nearby location to another. If I say "her family came from Japan" it is clear I'm talking about ancestry and/or a long ago emigration, but also spa…
Unless we mean that she came from one school of philosophy or art to another. Or she came from the school long ago to move somewhere else.
> If I say "her family came from Japan" it is clear I'm talking about ancestry and/or a long ago emigration
Unless her family came from Japan as part of a cruise before going to Thailand. Or her family moved out of Japan because they were American military stationed in Okinawa.
Getting rid of copula gets rid of only a small portion of the ambiguity in natural language.