Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

“Darmok” is Internet favorite, about a species which language is exclusively in analogy that the translator could not be set up, and they decide to kidnap Picard to establish vocabulary over a campfire.

There were couple episodes in Voyager in which aliens deem humans interesting but lesser, and tries to experiment or study on crews. One that I remember ended up in a ship self destruction, in another the doctor leaving his copy. As to why they didn’t simply ask Borg for a zipped archive, I don’t know.

The Dominion commanders throughout DS9 must have made similar remarks, and so should Cardassians have. Q would outright say so in spite, corrupted Data might. Maybe combination of those? Or maybe I’m just a suboptimal Trekkie :p

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 Chinese or Japanese (assuming those are their native spoken languages) than for an American student to learn to read/write English. It may defy what you think you know as common sense, but it is a replicable observation.

The reason for this is that nobody except little children actually read by sounding out individual letters of words. That would be too much for the human mind to process in real time. You learn to read by recognizing particular clusters of lines on a paper or screen as having semantic meaning, and your brain translates that directly. The imlpiactoin is the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. (Did you read that OK?)

So essentially, you and a Chinese person both put in the same amount of effort to learn the same number of squiggly lines on paper as having semantic meaning, and memorizing a mapping of squiggles to words. It's just that in English the pronunciation is emphasized in the writing, whereas in Chinese it is mainly the meaning of the word that is focused on. But given that in this age most of our communication is through text which may never even be read aloud, it does make one wonder if the Chinese had the right idea all along.

But if so, rather than use a 3000 year old writing system with a lot of inherited historical baggage, why not start afresh? Keep the same basic concept (digital pictures in squares representing atomistic units of meaning, aligned in sequential order according to a grammar), but allow the pictures to make full benefit of today's digital display and font rendering technology. The logical end result of this is, I believe, emoji. Or something very close to it / evolved from it.

To get an idea of what I mean, you might want to check out Xu Bing's "Book from the Ground", which is a very readable book written in emoji, or something close to it. You can read about his work here:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/emojis-comics-novel-futu...

Why is it so hard, and why hasn't anybody done it before? The whole problem seems trivial to me. You need a language where

    - first you need your words to have only one meaning. You can even use an existing vocabulary, like English, or Esperanto. 
    - then you need to be express math/logic/structured programming.

That's it, now you have a language without any ambiguity. If there are some ambiguity in the objects/concepts that you are referring, then use your language more to specify the object.

> Exercise: try stating this without the copula.

‘The copula has many uses.’

or:

‘The copula can be used in many different situations.’

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Also, I think you underestimate the amount of variation in other words, e.g.:

> 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.

Not just recent past, but having any time near to the point of reference: ‘When she came from school after the bomb scare…’.

> 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.

Or they might have arrived yesterday to visit her.

> 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 only because ‘3pm’ and ‘5pm’ themselves have clear temporal reference as opposed to spatial reference. For an ambiguous example, if I say ‘we drove from breakfast to lunch’, that might mean we drove starting at breakfast-time and finishing at lunch-time, or it might mean we started at a location where we had breakfast and drove to a location where we had lunch. (To more fully show that the latter is a valid interpretation, consider ‘we drove from breakfast to breakfast’: it makes no sense if ‘breakfast’ is a time, but it makes sense if treated with the sense of ‘place where we had breakfast’.)

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> 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).

This doesn’t sound quite right to me. In my view, both ‘has’ and ‘is’ are basically relationships, rather than quantifiers. Consider a sentence like ‘I have the keys’: this merely states a relationship between two objects, rather than quantifying over any set. A sentence like ‘The morning star is the evening star’ is similar in this regard. It is true that a sentence like ‘I have a key’ has existential meaning — but I suspect the quantification is linked to the indefinite article ‘a’ more than the verb.

> 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 ambiguity isn’t limited to the copula, though. ‘I like him’ has exactly the same kind of ambiguity.

> Feel free to email me if you'd like to actually collaborate on this.

Emailed, though I’m not sure how much time I’d actually have available to collaborate.

> The one in particular that I'm thinking of is, I believe, the Summer 2014 topic of "Integrating Montague Semantics and Event Semantics."

I’ll have a look at it, thanks!

> When I say I want unambiguous meaning, I mean something very specific: monoparsing of sentences to logical statements/semantic formalisms. There ought to be a one-to-one mapping between sentences in the language, and logical sentences in this universal formalism. The claims of those sentences could be as broad or narrow as desired, but there shouldn't be any ambiguity about what is being claimed.

OK, this makes far more sense. I still maintain there will be a lot of ambiguity, purely because the individual words themselves are ambiguous, but it’s an interesting goal nonetheless.