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Lojban: "spelling is phonetic and unambiguous" They clearly ignored that rule for the name of the language =) On a more serious note, this is rather exciting.

Lojban: "spelling is phonetic and unambiguous" They clearly ignored that rule for the name of the language =) On a more serious note, this is rather exciting. It would make a very good candidate for a universal language. A great deal of time and effort went into making this language. Hopefully this isn't the last time I hear of Lojban.

DanielStraight 17y ago
If you like this, you should read In The Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent. Aside from the being the best non-fiction book I've ever read, it talks about Lojban and characteristics of invented languages that make them suitable for becoming a universal language. It turns out, Lojban would make a terrible universal language for precisely the reason I pointed out in my other post. It's too complicated. When we speak, we frequently start a sentence not knowing how it's going to end. We pause and insert filler words to give us time to form our thoughts. We use ambiguity because sometimes we just don't know precisely what we're trying to say (Lojban has, if I recall correctly from Okrent's book, over 30 ways to say 'and'). Forcing people to have a complete understanding of what they want to say before saying it won't make them more clear when they talk, it'll make them not talk.
- human_v2 17y ago
  I agree that would disqualify it as a universal language candidate. At the same time though, how often do you wish you'd thought out your next sentence in its entirety when speaking to your girlfriend/boss/mother/etc ?
  - DanielStraight 17y ago
    I'm a rather thoughtful speaker, so I rarely regret my words, but this is a somewhat separate issue. There are lots of factors that affect how likely someone is to say something they will later regret. The biggest thing that makes people say things they'll regret isn't a language, it's the internet. If you say something you might regret in a letter, it's pretty easy to catch it before sending it. In an email, not so easy. In an IM, you're likely to send the message before you've even read it back. What this tells me isn't that we need better tools (whether they be software or languages or anything else), it's that sometimes people say stupid things, and we need to be more understanding. A hundred years ago, it may have been reasonable to expect that a long-distance friend would never say anything rude to you, because they'd have time to edit their words. It isn't reasonable to expect that anymore. People haven't changed, but their ability to edit themselves has. Instead of trying to recreate that ability to edit ourselves, we need to evolve our interactions with each other so that these thoughts that we had time to edit before don't play such a big role in our communication.
- tijlan 17y ago
  > When we speak, we frequently start a sentence not knowing how it's going to end. You can start and continue with a Lojban sentence indefinitely via various means. Metalinguistic markers such as sei ... se'u allows a discursive (on-the-fly) predicate or sentence. You can insert parenthetical notes with to ... toi into anywhere. You can insert the attitudinals (used to express attitudes, emotions, evidentiality, etc.) into anywhere. A construct called tanru allows an endless sequence of predicates (whose form in Lojban do not alter according to the natlang parts of speech such as adjective or adverb, thus imposing less restrictions on the way you keep forming a sentence than natlangs such as English does). With li'o you can omit any quantity of text you don't want in your expressions. With si/sa/su you can 'erase' various mistakes in your utterance. And so forth. > We pause and insert filler words to give us time to form our thoughts. That's what y is for in Lojban. > We use ambiguity because sometimes we just don't know precisely what we're trying to say The unambiguity of Lojban is mostly syntactic, not always semantic. You can be semantically ambiguous in Lojban with e.g. tanru. > (Lojban has, if I recall correctly from Okrent's book, over 30 ways to say 'and'). Which includes ju'e, a vague connective for "and". > Forcing people to have a complete understanding of what they want to say before saying it Which is not the case in Lojban.
  - DanielStraight 17y ago
    Syntactic ambiguity is half the point. I still have to decide whether or not I want to use the vague/all-purpose connective for "and." If I want to add parenthetical information, I have to realize I'm doing that and indicate it. If I want to "erase" a mistake, I have to recognize that that's what I want to do and use the proper word. I still have to know exactly what I intend to say. When I'm speaking, I don't think to myself, "Ok, this is parenthetical... this is correcting an error... this is vague and all-purpose." I just speak. In Python, whether or not a method is private is defined basically by whether or not you call it from another class. In Java, you have to be explicit about it. You CAN just declare everything public (be vague and all-purpose), but aside from being frowned upon, you still have to conciously decide to do this. If you don't care about the protection of scope, you can make everything public, but you're still specifying scope. In Python, you don't specify scope at all. Even if you wanted to, you can't. The same thing shows up in type checking. If you want, you just call everything an object in Java. It's vague and all-purpose, but you still have to specify a type. You still can't write 'a = 4'. You still have to write 'Object a = new Integer(4);', which it's tough to argue is simpler just because it isn't type-checked. Explicit ambiguity is not much closer than explicit disambiguity to implicit ambiguity. I realize at this point, I'm getting beyond my own knowledge of Lojban, but I just want to make the general point that being able to be ambiguous does not automatically afford the advantages of the natural ambiguity in "natlangs."
RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
> Lojban: "spelling is phonetic and unambiguous" > They clearly ignored that rule for the name of the language =) I don't understand your point. The name of the language follows precisely the same rules of spelling and pronunciation. Can you expand on why you think otherwise?
eyeonus 17y ago
In Lojban,the letters which appear in the word Lojban are pronounced thusly: L as in Logger; O as in wOn't; J as in aZure; B as in Boy; A as in wAter; N as in Nice; Lojban is therefore pronounced LõZH-ban, with stress on "LõZH". "Lojban" is a cmene (name) derived from the lujvo (compound word) "lojbau", a conjunction of "lojbo bangu", a tanru meaning "logical type-of language". "Lojban" is not ambiguous as to spelling, being phonetic (unlike "phonetic") and also non-ambiguous in meaning, since the name for the logical language Lojban means "logical language".
Matt_Arnold 17y ago
human_v2, Although a few people want a Universal Language, the Logical Language Group which administers the Lojban language standard has never sought that as the purpose of Lojban. It is a thought experiment. -Matt Arnold President, Logical Language Group

DanielStraight 17y ago

If you like this, you should read In The Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent. Aside from the being the best non-fiction book I've ever read, it talks about Lojban and characteristics of invented languages that make them suitable for becoming a universal language. It turns out, Lojban would make a terrible universal language for precisely the reason I pointed out in my other post. It's too complicated. When we speak, we frequently start a sentence not knowing how it's going to end. We pause and insert filler words to give us time to form our thoughts. We use ambiguity because sometimes we just don't know precisely what we're trying to say (Lojban has, if I recall correctly from Okrent's book, over 30 ways to say 'and'). Forcing people to have a complete understanding of what they want to say before saying it won't make them more clear when they talk, it'll make them not talk.

human_v2 17y ago
I agree that would disqualify it as a universal language candidate. At the same time though, how often do you wish you'd thought out your next sentence in its entirety when speaking to your girlfriend/boss/mother/etc ?
- DanielStraight 17y ago
  I'm a rather thoughtful speaker, so I rarely regret my words, but this is a somewhat separate issue. There are lots of factors that affect how likely someone is to say something they will later regret. The biggest thing that makes people say things they'll regret isn't a language, it's the internet. If you say something you might regret in a letter, it's pretty easy to catch it before sending it. In an email, not so easy. In an IM, you're likely to send the message before you've even read it back. What this tells me isn't that we need better tools (whether they be software or languages or anything else), it's that sometimes people say stupid things, and we need to be more understanding. A hundred years ago, it may have been reasonable to expect that a long-distance friend would never say anything rude to you, because they'd have time to edit their words. It isn't reasonable to expect that anymore. People haven't changed, but their ability to edit themselves has. Instead of trying to recreate that ability to edit ourselves, we need to evolve our interactions with each other so that these thoughts that we had time to edit before don't play such a big role in our communication.
tijlan 17y ago
> When we speak, we frequently start a sentence not knowing how it's going to end. You can start and continue with a Lojban sentence indefinitely via various means. Metalinguistic markers such as sei ... se'u allows a discursive (on-the-fly) predicate or sentence. You can insert parenthetical notes with to ... toi into anywhere. You can insert the attitudinals (used to express attitudes, emotions, evidentiality, etc.) into anywhere. A construct called tanru allows an endless sequence of predicates (whose form in Lojban do not alter according to the natlang parts of speech such as adjective or adverb, thus imposing less restrictions on the way you keep forming a sentence than natlangs such as English does). With li'o you can omit any quantity of text you don't want in your expressions. With si/sa/su you can 'erase' various mistakes in your utterance. And so forth. > We pause and insert filler words to give us time to form our thoughts. That's what y is for in Lojban. > We use ambiguity because sometimes we just don't know precisely what we're trying to say The unambiguity of Lojban is mostly syntactic, not always semantic. You can be semantically ambiguous in Lojban with e.g. tanru. > (Lojban has, if I recall correctly from Okrent's book, over 30 ways to say 'and'). Which includes ju'e, a vague connective for "and". > Forcing people to have a complete understanding of what they want to say before saying it Which is not the case in Lojban.
- DanielStraight 17y ago
  Syntactic ambiguity is half the point. I still have to decide whether or not I want to use the vague/all-purpose connective for "and." If I want to add parenthetical information, I have to realize I'm doing that and indicate it. If I want to "erase" a mistake, I have to recognize that that's what I want to do and use the proper word. I still have to know exactly what I intend to say. When I'm speaking, I don't think to myself, "Ok, this is parenthetical... this is correcting an error... this is vague and all-purpose." I just speak. In Python, whether or not a method is private is defined basically by whether or not you call it from another class. In Java, you have to be explicit about it. You CAN just declare everything public (be vague and all-purpose), but aside from being frowned upon, you still have to conciously decide to do this. If you don't care about the protection of scope, you can make everything public, but you're still specifying scope. In Python, you don't specify scope at all. Even if you wanted to, you can't. The same thing shows up in type checking. If you want, you just call everything an object in Java. It's vague and all-purpose, but you still have to specify a type. You still can't write 'a = 4'. You still have to write 'Object a = new Integer(4);', which it's tough to argue is simpler just because it isn't type-checked. Explicit ambiguity is not much closer than explicit disambiguity to implicit ambiguity. I realize at this point, I'm getting beyond my own knowledge of Lojban, but I just want to make the general point that being able to be ambiguous does not automatically afford the advantages of the natural ambiguity in "natlangs."

RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago

> Lojban: "spelling is phonetic and unambiguous" > They clearly ignored that rule for the name of the language =) I don't understand your point. The name of the language follows precisely the same rules of spelling and pronunciation. Can you expand on why you think otherwise?

eyeonus 17y ago

In Lojban,the letters which appear in the word Lojban are pronounced thusly: L as in Logger; O as in wOn't; J as in aZure; B as in Boy; A as in wAter; N as in Nice; Lojban is therefore pronounced LõZH-ban, with stress on "LõZH". "Lojban" is a cmene (name) derived from the lujvo (compound word) "lojbau", a conjunction of "lojbo bangu", a tanru meaning "logical type-of language". "Lojban" is not ambiguous as to spelling, being phonetic (unlike "phonetic") and also non-ambiguous in meaning, since the name for the logical language Lojban means "logical language".

Matt_Arnold 17y ago

human_v2, Although a few people want a Universal Language, the Logical Language Group which administers the Lojban language standard has never sought that as the purpose of Lojban. It is a thought experiment. -Matt Arnold President, Logical Language Group