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Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

mw.lojban.org

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Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#121

Post by EddieEngineers »

oh_sigh wrote: post #93
zearen wrote: post #79

I'm one of the few conversation Lojban speakers, and after years extended study, I've found the language does not meet expectations. When you start deeply exploring the semantics, many constructs are only half defined or nonsensical. Further, the self appointed DFL tries to preserve the language in an unusable state and had alienated most of the proficient speakers. There are other logical languages out there. Most o…

> I'm one of the few conversation Lojban speakers, and after years extended study Honest question...why?

I didn’t take it that far but asked my parents for the Lojban book for Christmas and did find it fun to work through. Sometimes it’s fun to just nerd out about something totally different to normal :) The year after I got a lockpick tutorial set.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#122

Post by throwawayForMe2 »

I spent some time looking at Loglan, purchased some books and tapes, but never really made any progress with it. A Scientific American article got me interested, pre-internet days so finding a community to converse with was not easy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#123

Post by euroderf »

IIRC Loglan vocabulary had a large element of Mandarin Chinese, and so Lojban too ?

This seemed both uselessly idealistic and absurdly user-hostile. I would think that a conlang targeted at global appeal would be based on some combination of Romance languages and Germanic languages, perhaps an ur-version of each (like, Latin and Icelandic). Such a process might bring you a result where the vocabulary was as accessible as English while having immensely better-than-English spelling, grammar, morphology, etc.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#124

Post by xigoi »

adastra22 wrote: post #44
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be terrible. Ideographic written languages are hard to learn (you need to memorize much more to get basic skills) and hard to parse (tokenization is more difficult). Of course, if that means the entire world speaks the same language, the price would be worth it. But I doubt we will converge on anything that is difficult to master, since water takes the path of least resistance.

That's not actually true. When MacArthur tried to get rid of the use of Chinese characters in Japanese writing during the post-WW2 occupation, he backed off when it was embarrassingly pointed out that Japan had a higher literacy rate than the US, despite having less of an investment in state schools at the time. Studies have shown that it does not take more time or effort for a child to learn to read and write Chines…

English is the worst possible representative of alphabet-based languages.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#125

Post by soonix »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #111

A long time ago I tried to learn Esperanto well enough to read in it. I quit, but I was still intrigued. Given events in the last 18 months, instead of a constructed language like Lojban or Esperanto I would vote for a small subset of English with a limited grammar and vocabulary - with tools to enforce both vocabulary and simplified grammar. Why the change in opinion? It turns out that English works better than many…

Looks like you think about "Basic English" which is a bit more formalized than Wikipedia's "Simple English" - see https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English (and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English )

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#126

Post by baby »

adastra22 wrote: post #44
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be terrible. Ideographic written languages are hard to learn (you need to memorize much more to get basic skills) and hard to parse (tokenization is more difficult). Of course, if that means the entire world speaks the same language, the price would be worth it. But I doubt we will converge on anything that is difficult to master, since water takes the path of least resistance.

That's not actually true. When MacArthur tried to get rid of the use of Chinese characters in Japanese writing during the post-WW2 occupation, he backed off when it was embarrassingly pointed out that Japan had a higher literacy rate than the US, despite having less of an investment in state schools at the time. Studies have shown that it does not take more time or effort for a child to learn to read and write Chines…

I don’t think I agree with your conclusion. Taiwan had a higher degree of literacy than China in spite of traditional characters, yet most Chinese and Taiwanese people seem to have a hard time remembering characters. Indeed in China people just use pinyin mostly now to type, which uses the latin alphabet.

The best thing you can do today if you want quick adoption of a language is to use the latin alphabet.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#127

Post by schoen »

adastra22 wrote: post #113
schoen wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But unfortunately in natural language even when a language is correctly parsed in terms of syntax--which is all Lojban seeks to accomplish--there are still many different possible semantic implications. For example, the sentence "Spot didn't bark" could mean > 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…

My intended reading of (2) is the same as your (3), but that just goes to show how ill suited English is for making these sorts of exact inferences.

I guess I was distinguishing them in terms of whether the event in question has already previously been specified, or is being newly introduced and specified now.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#128

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

Lojban in theory can address syntactic ambiguity (that has semantic consequences). Lexical ambiguity is somewhat hopeless (unless you only have a fixed number of things, states, eventualities, &c. you're going to refer to). [This isn't an issue of Lojban as such, just of representational systems.]

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#129

Post by tester457 »

zearen wrote: post #120
oh_sigh wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm one of the few conversation Lojban speakers, and after years extended study Honest question...why?

Can you clarify your question ?

Fitting question from a Lojbanist.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#130

Post by int_19h »

vidarh wrote: post #74
int_19h wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised. I've met people with preferred pronouns like xe who were outright offended at the use of they/them, because "that's not my pronoun".

Different category of objections, so not really relevant to the point, which was about the objection to their use in general, not about any given person.

But it's not really a "universal pronoun" if you can't use it to denote any random person without offending them.
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