Ithkuil also is a constructed language with the goal of being completely un-ambiguous. As a bonus it uses the most phonemes of any language so complex messages and meanings can be communicated in an efficient way.
Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication
81–90 of 145 posts
Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication
#82I'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 o…
It would seem Toaq was started by a former Lojbanist, interesting.
Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication
#83I'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 o…
Oh hey I'm in that discord. I'm the one with that weird highly domain specific loglang and occasionally obtusely adversarial question (aka "trolling")
Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication
#84XKCD on Lojban: https://xkcd.com/191/
Well put. The socio-technical system gets so much neater if you take all the socio bits out of it.
Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
I suspect for clarity of communication we'd need to start with clarity of thought - the reason legalise doesn't eliminate ambiguity is because people aren't effectively omniscient, regardless of the level of their training. Add to that a shifting environment (new considerations etc) which can make previously valid documents ambiguous and you have a recipe for difficulties. tl;dr cognitive ambiguities and changing cir…
I agree and disagree. I do think that the purpose of legal documents is to take a given set of inputs and dictate a predictable output. But (1) sometimes ambiguity is deliberate (for instance, to kick the can on a business point and hope that it never actually manifests itself after the deal is signed) and (2) as you note, sometimes totally unexpected circumstances arise.
Wouldn’t any constructed/logical language (is that the right term?) also be susceptible to unpredictable future developments?
Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 There's your answer. There is no such language, there are no such words. It's questionable if it's even possible - to me, it sounds like a category error. "Words" aren't keys in a hash table, and "meaning" isn't a discrete thing. > now you…
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?
Virtually every word has edge cases and gray areas, so there can be no 1:1 correlation between language and the world. Think of something as basic as "chair." Is a love seat a couch or a chair, or both? What about a bench? A stool? An ottoman? A small table? A tree stump? Reasonable people will give different answers, and some answers will be nonbinary ("it's very chairlike but not strictly a chair").
Once thought is encoded in language, it's in a lossy symbolic domain. It's in a messy shared vector space. And every human decoder unpacks the embeddings differently.
Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh I'm happy to continue this conversation here, although it's late where I am and I'll be going to bed soon, and HN threads are ephemeral. Feel free to email me if you'd like to actually collaborate on this. > Looks interesting… where should I start reading? IIRC he did some graduate summer schools that were recorded online and have attached lecture notes. Those plus the referenced papers would be a good place to st…
> for every dog there exists at least one barking event with that dog as the acting subject Just to wrap my head around your definition of universal and unambiguous here. If the language cant nail down the definition of dog to something all parties agree on, would the claim still be unambigous?
Yes, as explained in my other comment down thread. All parties would agree on the logical claim being made “for-each dog, exists event { dog did bark }”. There could be multiple interpretations of this claim using alternative or stretched definitions of the words “dog” or “bark,” but the logical structure would be unambiguous.
Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> LMBTQ movement has came into my mind immediately. I think they would have more success by introducing a new, 'don't care about your sex' pronoun to the language instead of adding a third one that just complicates matters. I thought it was more of a pro-caring thing than a pro-uncaring thing. Those focusing too much on the latter are really quite good at bumbling into insulting behavior...
Slippery slope fallacy here. Why should I care if my online customer is he/she/they as long as they pay the price? Or if I talk about technology through the Internet? All I want is effective communication with no insults.
Is this meant to describe how a slippery slope forms, or call one out?
Effective communication involving other people only sometimes overlaps with this subjective-first, transactional approach, the: I care about, I talk about, or All I want is.
(It's a great view for designing a specific type of community, with business-transactional perspective + valuing of tightening subjective logic and avoiding fallacy. Well, this will always result in a specific type of tech community with some special focus on business and economic factors as combined with tech.)
And I guess if we effectively cherry-pick the premise, with straw people assuming their various positions on the stage, we can easily justify a more anonymizing, transactional view of language. "This is how I prefer to view my life, therefore the needed language looks like..."
In this view, language doesn't need all that extra stuff. Keep it direct, functional, logical, and avoid fallacies especially.
But this isn't really getting at the relating capabilities of language for example, like when there are bigger problems at hand and diverse mindsets working together to solve them.
Instead, it ends up bringing minds into silos, as broader personality theory predicts. So the I, I, me, is really more about self-support.
With this view, individuals effectively make relating all about the subjective-them 24/7, and about whether they are good/not good. They see relating with others as "we will each be our best and get what we each want" as if it's a universal creed. The one philosophy that just makes sense. Do others even exist?
And is this actively mean? No. Perhaps a better term is effectively: "passively careless," to borrow a phrase from Sabine Hossenfelder. And even in the subjective-first view it still does not make for a high-quality individual, which is also bad news.
It's unfortunate, because not only does this view raise the stakes on their end with no good reason, creating things like martyrdom issues, but it also perpetuates the avoidance of effective contact with others, effectively making "others" the persistent bête noir.
Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication
#89I 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…
You might like another language called toaq (toaq.net) which is a tonal logical conlang, it has probably the nicest looking writing system I’ve seen
Thanks! Yes I’m aware of Toaq. I like many aspects of it. I just have too much baggage from trying to learn one tonal language (mandarin) to try to pick up another.
Re: Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication
#90Earlier 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
The latter part actually refers to fruit flies (insects), who like bananas. Also took me a while to figure out.
Ah - bugs will be bugs!