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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

#31

Post by jpk »

Beltiras wrote: post #20
adastra22 wrote: post #12

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 Lojban’s formalism was out of date already when it was proposed as Loglan half a century ago.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 wonder if you could get the intended result for any language with a simple ruleset. You don't need a language to reduce/eliminate miscommunications, you need intent and understanding.

This is kinda what we call "legalese". It's a sort of formalized subset of English (or whatever language) that leans on standardized turns of phrase, it tends to set up definitions for terms that are then used throughout a document, etc. All in order to reduce misunderstanding and (hopefully) be easy to interpret in the event of a dispute.

However, we have whole judicial systems that spend a non-trivial fraction of their time interpreting legal verbiage. So clearly it falls short at least some of the time, otherwise courts could be, in part, automated away. Maybe that's because it's too hard or not possible with natural languages? Or the legalese ruleset just isn't refined enough?

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#32

Post by adastra22 »

bradrn wrote: post #19
adastra22 wrote: post #12

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 Lojban’s formalism was out of date already when it was proposed as Loglan half a century ago.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’d be interested in hearing more about this. Don’t know much about formal semantics (and in fact am somewhat skeptical of the whole field), but I do have a background in language construction, and would say I have a fairly good knowledge of linguistics more generally.

My email is in my profile.

Formal semantics is a broad field full of some very interesting and practical theories, and a lot of quackery. I don't blame you for being skeptical. Specifically though I think that Lucas Champollion has done a great job of marrying Davidsonian event semantics with more modern work on qualifiers and counterfactuals that finally creates--I believe--an universal framework for capturing the full meaning of any speech utterance:

https://champollion.hosting.nyu.edu

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 Lojban failed to even attempt: unambiguous meaning.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#34

Post by adastra22 »

transfire wrote: post #21
adastra22 wrote: post #12

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…

Semantic predicates don't solve the problem. It's an improvement for sure, as I believe the place-structure or Lojban/Loglan is the single worst mistake that has ever been made in any conlang. But grammatically it wouldn't change anything. The parsed meaning of a Lojban sentence is still ambiguous. Lojban does not try to have monoparsing of sentences to logical statements, except in very limited contexts.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#35

Post by BiteCode_dev »

adastra22 wrote: post #16
baby wrote: post #15

After learning toki pona (the simplest conlang perhaps?) I got attracted by Lojban due to the machine-parsable aspect of the conlang, but I found it really tedious and not fun to learn. I started working on a conlang with similar ideas a while back (emojis in the language, machine parsable) but less strict and nicer sounding. Never ended up with anything though :)

You might like Mini / Mini Kore. I no joke believe that the eventual end state of linguistic evolution is an ideographic written language with emoji as characters.

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.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#36

Post by sgtnoodle »

pwnmonkey wrote: post #26
tagyro wrote: post #9

I vaguely remember a TNG* episode in which humans encounter an alien race that found our language too ...inaccurate, and spent a lot of time going over each word and sentence, to precisely define its meaning. * Was it TNG or am I dreaming? *edit: Thank you everyone, but it wasn't "Darmok". The humans and the aliens were working, for a long time, on a treaty of sorts because the human language was so confusing and amb…

Shaka, when the walls fell?

I recall that episode, but I'm not sure that's what they were referencing.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#37

Post by blauditore »

djtango wrote: post #17
jmillikin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The latter part actually refers to fruit flies (insects), who like bananas. Also took me a while to figure out.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#39

Post by adastra22 »

bradrn wrote: post #30
adastra22 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a better language helps. Every language has some pain points that are responsible for more than their fair share of miscommunications. Just to use English as an example, although this is true of most natural languages, the overuse of the copula "is/are" is a consistent source of mistakes whether accidental or purposeful. So much so that computer programmers learning object oriented programming have to be taugh…

> 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 spatially oriented. If I say "the party is from 3pm to 5pm" then I am using "from" to indicate a temporal rather than a spatial motion. But it still conveys the same basic meaning in all these cases, as the origin point of a motion or interval, and it is not usually the case that a single usage of the word could be confused for more than one meaning.

The IS-A vs HAS-A relationship is entirely different. It is the difference between existential quantification (some aspect of this thing resembles/has an X) and universal quantification (the entirety of this thing is fully captured by the meaning of X). Rigorously analyzed these are very different claims. In a strongly typed language they couldn't be substituted for each other.

To make this concrete, if I say "he is bad" then it is unclear whether I am saying that person is an intrinsically bad man, or if I am just commenting that the thing that he is doing right now is not morally justified.

This may seem like splitting hairs, but that's rather the point. It's at the edge of what we are comfortable thinking about in everyday life. But how much of that is because the language that we use--English--doesn't have these distinctions built into its very foundation? If we were native speakers of a E-Prime, maybe this distinction would be obvious and trivial. And maybe, just maybe, we wouldn't let politicians and con men off the hook so easily for equivocating language.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#40

Post by TeMPOraL »

bradrn wrote: post #30
adastra22 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a better language helps. Every language has some pain points that are responsible for more than their fair share of miscommunications. Just to use English as an example, although this is true of most natural languages, the overuse of the copula "is/are" is a consistent source of mistakes whether accidental or purposeful. So much so that computer programmers learning object oriented programming have to be taugh…

> 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’…

Yup. One man's "overuse" and "source of mistakes" is another man's way to draw attention towards a region in the latent^H^H^H^H^H^H idea space.

This is useful and often good enough, because a) the rest of what's been said and situational context will help home in on more specific associations (and if not, one can always ask for clarification), and b) we often don't need to resolve specific ideas - "my friend is a samurai" may just be an invitation for the other person to reply "oh, fun, speaking of more ancient cultures, have you read about ...", and then continue jumping around big clusters of associations, without ever properly resolving any.

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