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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

#71

Post by philwelch »

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…

> 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.

I’m not sure this can be solely attributed to the difference between character sets.

> 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.

This sounds a lot like the theory that justified getting rid of phonics in schools, which has been an unmitigated disaster. It’s also not true when you consider how adult readers approach new words; English in particular isn’t great at this but there’s at least a hope that you’ll know how to pronounce a word you see written down, which approaches certainty in other alphabetic languages. This is useful for cross-referencing between spoken and written language.

> (Did you read that OK?)

Most English readers can mentally correct transposed letters, which is yet more evidence of the resiliency of alphabetic writing.

> 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.

I very much doubt that this is true. It might be true (or seem true) in the weird bubble you and I live in, but it’s not true for the majority of people.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#72

Post by dontlaugh »

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…

Even Chinese speakers can usually guess the pronunciation of a word they’d never seen, because of how radicals work. English is barely better than Chinese at this.

Of course there are plenty of languages far better than either, with almost perfect match between spoken and written language. Language changes constantly, after all.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#73

Post by bmacho »

sillymath wrote: post #65
bmacho wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't get it. In the linguistic part the only problem is to make to word->object mapping unambiguous. And it is trivial problem. If the world is fuzzy (i don't think so) then is not a problem in linguistics. Yet linguists seem to aim for a language that eliminates ambiguity (see TFA). Where am I wrong?

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?

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#74

Post by vidarh »

int_19h wrote: post #62
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…

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.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#75

Post by yosito »

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

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 denotes an action or a profession. For example, the verb "tanul" (to study) becomes "tanulás" (study or studying).

2. "-ó/-ő": Converts a verb into a noun that refers to a person who does the action. For example, "tanít" (to teach) becomes "tanító" (teacher).

3. "-hat/-het": Added to a verb to form a new verb indicating possibility or permission. For example, "olvas" (reads) turns into "olvas-hat" (may/can read).

4. "-tlan/-tlen": When attached to a noun, it creates an adjective expressing the lack of something. For example, "szín" (color) becomes "színtelen" (colorless).

5. "-i": Added to a noun to create an adjective indicating origin or belonging. For example, "Amerika" (America) becomes "amerikai" (American).

6. "-ol": Attached to nouns to form verbs. This is often used with foreign words in Hungarian, like "ghosting-ol", "bullying-ol", "coworking-ol".

Additionally, in Hungarian these suffixes can be combined, so if you want to use the English noun "ghosting" as a noun in Hungarian, you still actually have to add the suffixes, so you would say "ghosting-ol-ás".

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#76

Post by leke »

I tried to learn lojban back in the day. I liked the phonetics, vocabulary and system in general, but it seemed an impossible task to remember the placeholder order of every single predicate. Maybe not so much of a struggle for an AI though.

I still believe there will be an awesome international auxiliary language that the world will embrace, or rather those who wish to communicate with everyone will embrace. It may currently exist or might yet need to be invented. People are making new ones all the time.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#77

Post by [deleted] »

yosito wrote: post #75
djtango wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

[deleted]

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#79

Post by zearen »

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 of them are in development, and are discussed in a Discord called the "Logical Languages Lodge". However there is another called Toaq that is almost complete, it at least as complete as Lojban (its vocabulary is still growing, but all of the essential words are there, and the grammar and semantics are complete). If you wish to learn a logical language in 2023, that's the one I'd suggest.

Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication

#80

Post by shagie »

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

On my yet to be assembled shelf of random things will be a bunch of books that intend to make one go o_O when they read titles in the background of video call.

One of the books is the language guide to Ithkuil ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil /// https://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Ithkuil-Language-John-Quijada... //// https://youtu.be/x_x_PQ85_0k )

This might fit some of your goals.

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