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Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

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Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#131

Post by dragonwriter »

xdennis wrote: post #98
vidarh wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They/them already exists and have centuries of use for that use-case. The people objecting to that are just as likely to object to an entirely new one. There also are already multiple "neopronouns" [1], and they are frequently ridiculed by those taking issue with "unexpected" (to them) pronoun use). This is also not a new debate, with variants (other than singular they) being in use in limited contexts since the late…

> They/them already exists and have centuries of use for that use-case. This is just gaslighting. People use "they" when they talk in the abstract. No one said sentences like "This is Tom. They is happy." until a few years ago.

> No one said sentences like “This is Tom. They is happy.” until a few years ago.

No one still says that, because even when semantically singular, “they” remains grammatically plural.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#132

Post by yosito »

mike_hearn wrote: post #107
yosito wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not. It's named that way because the guy at Microsoft who implemented it (Charles Simonyi) was Hungarian.

I'd be willing to bet that his native language played a role in how he thought about naming things.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#133

Post by vidarh »

int_19h wrote: post #130
vidarh wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's moving the goalposts.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#134

Post by vidarh »

xdennis wrote: post #98
vidarh wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They/them already exists and have centuries of use for that use-case. The people objecting to that are just as likely to object to an entirely new one. There also are already multiple "neopronouns" [1], and they are frequently ridiculed by those taking issue with "unexpected" (to them) pronoun use). This is also not a new debate, with variants (other than singular they) being in use in limited contexts since the late…

> They/them already exists and have centuries of use for that use-case. This is just gaslighting. People use "they" when they talk in the abstract. No one said sentences like "This is Tom. They is happy." until a few years ago.

Apart from being grammatically wrong (it'd still be "they are"), this is entirely besides the point, which is that the people who object to (the corrected version of) this construction are just as likely to object to a neopronoun, and so there's little reason to assume a neopronoun will stop people from getting worked up over this even if you could get people to use them.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#136

Post by bmacho »

bmacho wrote: post #73
sillymath wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

theoretically you can introduce new words to be more precise, for example eskimos have many words for snow, from (1) that is because they use polysynthesis: a base word is attached to many different suffixes which change its meaning. So, while in the English language we might have a sentence describing snow, fusional languages such as the Eskimo-Aleut family will have long, complex words. So, you may solve the ambigu…

A more common example is the meme about women and men colors. Women have magenta and salmon, while men call both pink. This has not much to do with linguistics or eliminating ambiguity. You say 'pink', you mean 'pink', and if the other person wants to know which pink, they ask?

edit: this was a strawmanning, colors are a non-issue. But there can be situations where there are 2 objects, you say a word to refer one of the objects, and your partner thinks about the other object, and neither of you think that it was ambiguous, so you don't clarify until it's too late. Like there is a dead bear and a bear cub, you say 'bring the bear' and you mean the cub, and they mean the dead bear.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#138

Post by adastra22 »

baby wrote: post #126
adastra22 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Taiwanese mostly use BoPoMoFo input schemes, btw. The thing about "forgetting the characters" is recognition vs. production. Those are different skills supported by different parts of the brain, and if you only practice one then the other atrophies. Most people these days only write Chinese on a keyboard, so the computer does the work of transforming the phonetic input (BoPoMoFo in the case of Taiwan) into the correct character, saving the typist the trouble. Someone who forgot how to write a character will have no trouble entering it into an IME and selecting the right option. They'll know it when they see it.

If anything this just reinforces my original point: people consume written text more than they produce it, so we should optimize for that.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#139

Post by adastra22 »

int_19h wrote: post #61
adastra22 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> it does not take more time or effort for a child to learn to read and write Chinese or Japanese (assuming those are their native spoken languages) than for an American student to learn to read/write English. As alphabetic orthographies go, English is almost uniquely horrible, though, so that's hardly surprising. Have they tried comparing to e.g. Spanish? And yes, when we read with a practiced eye, we do pattern mat…

> And yes, when we read with a practiced eye, we do pattern match entire words at once. But it's much easier to get to that point with a simpler, composable writing system

It is not. From the moment you learn a character in Chinese you are sight-reading by shape. It doesn't take much practice at all. Every bilingual Chinese-English person I know prefers reading Chinese, no matter how long they have been exposed to both languages as it is less mentally straining. English is my first language and even I experience this to some degree.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#140

Post by baby »

adastra22 wrote: post #138
baby wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Taiwanese mostly use BoPoMoFo input schemes, btw. The thing about "forgetting the characters" is recognition vs. production. Those are different skills supported by different parts of the brain, and if you only practice one then the other atrophies. Most people these days only write Chinese on a keyboard, so the computer does the work of transforming the phonetic input (BoPoMoFo in the case of Taiwan) into the correc…

I agree with you up until the last point, they do produce it as well and most Chinese speakers are resorting to pinyin to produce, which uses the latin alphabet :D
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