Re: [stack] Lojban (was: Advantages of cat, joy ..?)

Thanks to John Cowan's ample explanation of Lojban & Dutch/Swiss-German
structure. I want to investigate this further - later.

IMO the  Lojban idea [as I understand it so far] has great merit.
The emphasis on fluency/speed-of-output reminds me of the
bloke who boasts that his CPU is 10 times faster: so he can save
5 msec. of CPU time for the 2 hour job.

IMO natural languages are a disaster for scientific work.
We need to move to constrained/designed syntax.
I wonder how Korean-script is ?
It apparently was designed, instead of evolved ?

IMO the aviation industry leads in the way of how procedures
ought-to/will be in future; eg. their syntax is minimal & constrained,
 as proven appropriate to reduce accidents.
I speculate that they should/will replace natural/talk by 'elect'
 mesgs.  Although sound has the advantage that it can 'interrupt'
 and be an input-channel additional to sight.

I'm going to goog to find out how to join/test the Lojban
community.     Being of the dominant language/culture can cause
you to miss a lot of 'value' of the other-side/s.

Yesterday I debugged my ex's 'misunderstanding', which may be
due to the gender or that she's Finnish: she insists that "it's in the
right passage of the area of the building", wheras I say "after you
enter, you turn left and then right, so it's the left passage".

OTOH for a vehicle/boat the left/right is considered from inside.
And for a house, from inside looking towards the front-door.
Since the area in the building has a single door/entry,
seeing the area like a house, you turn left to go to the right
passage.  So the foreigner/wrong-gender is not so wrong ?

Thanks,

== Chris Glur


On 2/24/09, John Cowan <[email protected]> wrote:
> William Tanksley scripsit:
>
>> I have to admit -- as someone pointed out --
>
> That would be me: author of _The Complete Lojban Language_ and coeditor
> of _What Is Lojban?_  I never learned much Lojban vocabulary, but at
> one time I understood Lojban grammar better than anyone else,
> despite not being a designer or non-trivial user of Lojban myself.
>
>> that my conclusion was ill-supported (although possible). A better
>> conclusion would be that although Lojban was designed to be highly
>> learnable, usable, and unambiguous, in practice it hasn't been.
>
> Unambiguity was (and remains) an explicit design point.  Fluency is
> a much higher bar than learnability and usability.  People can and
> have learned Lojban in the way that people learn programming language,
> but being able to use it to express all your thoughts _in real time_,
> as in conversation, is a lot more like passing the Turing test.
>
> As it is, there are Lojban-only blogs, a Lojban-only mailing list, and
> a Lojban-only IRC channel, and there have been quite a few Lojban-only
> telephone calls.  But you can't live your life nor do business nor get
> an education through the medium of Lojban, and until at least some of
> that becomes possible, fluency is probably unattainable.  (There have
> been formal Lojban classes with instructors in the past; I think almost
> all learners are self-learners now.)
>
>> One possible reason for this is that the designer didn't know enough
>> about the problems to be able to do the design work.
>
> True, although there wasn't a single designer for everything, but an
> evolving design tradition.  Loglan/Lojban, like Lisp and Fortran, goes
> back to the 1950s.
>
>> The reason that this explanation seems possible to me is that the
>> designer wasn't a linguist,
>
> Hoo boy, you're not kidding.  James Cooke Brown was a games designer.
> He understood formal logic fairly well, but his grasp of linguistics
> was perilously close to zero.  A lot has been improved since then.
>
>> and even modern linguists and cognitive
>> scientists don't generally claim to know enough to achieve Lojban's
>> goals.
>
> True again.
>
> --
> John Cowan    http://ccil.org/~cowan  [email protected]
> 'Tis the Linux rebellion / Let coders take their place,
> The Linux-nationale / Shall Microsoft outpace,
> We can write better programs / Our CPUs won't stall,
> So raise the penguin banner of / The Linux-nationale.  --Greg Baker
>