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Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

mw.lojban.org

141–145 of 145 posts

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#141

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 accessibl…

I have actually thought about this a lot in my life, I think a good compromise is to develop regional constructed languages that correspond to geography and current culture.

So for example, here in Alaska, Athabaskan languages are mostly dead, Yupik and Inupiaq is still around but English is predominant pretty much everywhere except west Alaska and the occasional community. Sugpiaq and Alutiiq are basically gone, Tlingit has a revival but it’s not around, Eyak is dead, etc.

Why don’t we create a blended conlang that can take pieces of each of these languages in the form of vocabulary and grammar - even though they’re very different grammatically and in terms of lexicon, we can make a language that is relatively easy for people to learn because it’s regular, substantially different than English so it’s not “colonizer-tongue” and largely unique to the geography of the place.

You could do the same thing in Europe to create lingua-francas.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#142

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 accessibl…

I have actually thought about this a lot in my life, I think a good compromise is to develop regional constructed languages that correspond to geography and current culture. So for example, here in Alaska, Athabaskan languages are mostly dead, Yupik and Inupiaq is still around but English is predominant pretty much everywhere except west Alaska and the occasional community. Sugpiaq and Alutiiq are basically gone, Tli…

This has been done (attempted) with Slavic languages. I can't vouch for how linguistically rigorous it might be, but it's out there.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fitting question from a Lojbanist.

Although surely it invites "yes, I can".

Lojban relies on implicit pragmatics just like any language. It's not that it's unambiguous. That's essentially impossible without also making the language impractical. It's precisely ambiguous meaning that one can be precisely as ambiguous as they intend to be, and provide facilities to this end that no other language has.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#144
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bo…

But until you do learn a Chinese character, you are unable to read it at all. Whereas with an alphabet or a syllabary, you can read anything as soon as you learn the letters; memorizing the shapes of the words comes later, and then only for those words you actually see often.

There's a reason why Hangul was a big deal in Korea when it was introduced, and why the upper classes tried to actively suppress it - it did, in fact, made reading and writing more accessible to the common folk. The same reasons why it was true then still apply.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#145

I take all my conlang opinions from jan Misali aka Conlang Critic and he tells me to love toki pona [0] instead of lojban [1]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLn6LC1RpAo [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-unefmAo9k

Very different languages with different goals
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