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 Lojban’s formalism was out of date already when it was proposed as Loglan half a century ago.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 idea of Lojban but want something more practical and with a firmer foundation to boot, contact me. I’ve got ideas and I’d love to find some people to work on this with.
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 only wish it sounded a bit better. It sounds a bit slavic, where as I find languages like Arabic and Italian much more pleasing to the ear.
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.
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.
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 taught the difference between "is-a" vs "has-a" relationships.
If you say "My coworker Taro is a samurai", what does that mean? Did he dress up as a samurai for the office costume party? Does he study older forms of Japanese martial arts? Was he descended from a noble family from the Japanese feudal era and have claim to an actual samurai title?
There are controlled dialects of English, like E-Prime, which forbid the use of the copula "to be" as ungrammatical, or at least heavily restrict it. You can say your coworker "dressed as a samurai", "trains in the arts of a samurai", or "traces ancestral lineage from a samurai clan", but you can't say he "is a samurai" in E-Prime.
Would this make communication more clear with fewer mistakes? I don't think this has been adequately studied enough to say for certain. But at least in certain domains like military speech and air traffic control we have examples of such enforced language simplification resulting in measurable decreases in miscommunications. I'm very curious to see if we can generalize those results to a full, general-purpose dialect or entirely new language.
> 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’…
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.
‘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.
> 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.
Unless we mean that she came from one school of philosophy or art to another. Or she came from the school long ago to move somewhere else.
> If I say "her family came from Japan" it is clear I'm talking about ancestry and/or a long ago emigration
Unless her family came from Japan as part of a cruise before going to Thailand. Or her family moved out of Japan because they were American military stationed in Okinawa.
Getting rid of copula gets rid of only a small portion of the ambiguity in natural language.
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.
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?
I think that when law is introduced the consequences are not clear so the small print is used to introduce modifications to the rules, so the problem is about adapting a rule to the everyday use of it.
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 circumstances are what make this hard, not language as a medium
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?
Yes, you could, because any natural language can be used to teach mathematics. Lojban is, like any notation, a convenience for people who understand the concepts, but the concepts can be expressed in a natural language just as precisely, albeit less concisely.
In fact, as Florian Cajori stated in his book "A History of Mathematical Notations", the rise of mathematical notation was opposed by people who preferred the older, natural language style of doing mathematics, what Cajori termed the "struggle between symbolists and rhetoricians."
So, yes, logic is mathematics, and humans did mathematics in natural language for a very long time before we invented the conlang of mathematical notation. Moving more of the ideas into what is, ultimately, a more expressive notation is not a fundamental shift.
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.
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:
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.
> 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.
Personally, I’m not sure if ‘unambiguous meaning’ is possible or even desirable. Even if formal semantics allows us to achieve complete unambiguity when it comes to grammatical categories (quantifiers, temporal and spatial setting, etc.), I think it would be exceedingly difficult to make every single lexeme completely unambiguous. And even if this were achieved, I’m not sure if such a language would even be usable by humans. Still, it would be an interesting experiment!
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 start. The one in particular that I'm thinking of is, I believe, the Summer 2014 topic of "Integrating Montague Semantics and Event Semantics." That marriage of Davidsonian and Montague semantics into a single framework is, I believe, a universal theory of semantics. [It should be noted that he makes no such grandiose claims.]
> Personally, I’m not sure if ‘unambiguous meaning’ is possible or even desirable
By 'unambiguous meaning' I mean something more specific than the words alone imply. [I am aware of the irony.]
In computational semantics, the goal is to transform a parsing of a sentence into a logical statement (or in the case of a question, a query) about the world. For example, the sentence "every dog barks" would be translated into a logical statement of the form "for every dog there exists at least one barking event with that dog as the acting subject." Or rather a mathematical statement to that effect that I don't know how to render on HN.
But unfortunately in natural language even when a language is correctly parsed in terms of syntax--which is all Lojban seeks to accomplish--there are still many different possible semantic implications. For example, the sentence "Spot didn't bark" could mean
1. There is no event in which Spot has ever barked, or
2. In the case of a specific event, Spot did not bark.
English doesn't differentiate without clarification, e.g. "Spot never barks" or "Spot didn't bark that time." Lojban has universal and existential quantifiers, but their use is not mandated.
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.
> 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.
Well I'm working two jobs and beginning the process of fundraising a new startup, all while parenting two kids. I'll be lucky to have any time myself ;) But it's good to keep in contact with like-minded individuals, in case the opportunity arises to get some work done on it.
> 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.
I think we are in agreement. There are two definitions of ambiguity in play here. There is logical ambiguity, which I want to eliminate, in which a sentence can be parsed in multiple, contradictory ways. And then there is ambiguity due to imprecision, in which words have broad meaning and without context or clarification a given sentence parsed to a single logical statement can nevertheless have multiple distinct interpretations. That's ok.
> I think we are in agreement. There are two definitions of ambiguity in play here. There is logical ambiguity, which I want to eliminate, in which a sentence can be parsed in multiple, contradictory ways. And then there is ambiguity due to imprecision, in which words have broad meaning and without context or clarification a given sentence parsed to a single logical statement can nevertheless have multiple distinct interpretations. That's ok.
Yeah, I can agree with all of this. (Although Anna Wierzbicka’s work on the ‘Natural Semantic Language’ is an attempt to control the latter sort of ambiguity… you might find it quite interesting, actually.)
> But unfortunately in natural language even when a language is correctly parsed in terms of syntax--which is all Lojban seeks to accomplish--there are still many different possible semantic implications. For example, the sentence "Spot didn't bark" could mean
> 1. There is no event in which Spot has ever barked, or 2. In the case of a specific event, Spot did not bark.
Or maybe even a third case:
3. There exists an event in which Spot did not bark.
English pragmatic usage would make this interpretation rare, but you could still imagine a case in which it was valid.
For example, suppose that Spot normally barks 100% of the time (and never sleeps?).
Then there is a fortunate day in which Spot only barked 70% of the time, and was quiet 30% of the time.
Someone who witnessed this might say "Spot didn't bark [today]!" to emphasize the unusual event, even though Spot did bark the majority of the time on that day.
I just mean to distinguish this from your second case because I think in the second case the "specific event" is possibly already one which is known to the listener or already under discussion.
I guess I was distinguishing them in terms of whether the event in question has already previously been specified, or is being newly introduced and specified now.
> 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.
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.
If there is anyone out there who likes the idea of Lojban but want something more practical and with a firmer foundation to boot, contact me. I’ve got ideas and I’d love to find some people to work on this with.