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Rex: #on 2/27/02 10:10 AM, And Rosta at arosta@hidden.email wrote: #> Loglan too can just say "invite sit", though it is true that there #> is a lot of scope for adding devices to Loglan that would make #> it more concise and less precise, when the need arises. # #Can it really? In L, 'invite sit' could only mean sit (imperative) in an #invite-type manner, or so it was when I last examined the language. Sorry -- you're right. I'm actually a Lojbanist, and tend to think of "Loglan" as a generic term for a family of languages whose protoypical member is Lojban. So what I should have said was: Lojban can just say "invite sit". #Loglan seems most definitely _not_ able to leave something out as #can Mandarin and often, english. Although 'Lojlan' seems verbose, it is not because of the obligatory marking of grammatical categories. Rather, it is for three reasons. First, missing out little words yields a structure with a meaning other than what is intended. Second, and more crucially, concision was simply not a design goal; although actual users are indubitably guided in their usage by factors like syllable-count. Hence the Lojlan design contains unexploited potential for abbreviatory constructions. And thirdly, the phonology and the morphological design means that the supply of short words and 'little'/function words is very very limited, and now exhausted. #> My point concerns not so much the "brief" "txiq stu" form #> but the supposedly precise and unambiguous "Go txiq ke zi stu" #> form. My contention is that the precision and lack of ambiguity #> can be achieved only by taking this goal as the starting #> point, and not eschewing formal logic, and then once that #> goal is achieved, shorter and less precise locutions can be #> developed. # #I'm not following you. Maybe I never understood what Loglan was all about. #I want Tx to have precise meanings for conjunctions, that sort of thing, #which any auxlang should strive for. That's why I want input from #Loglanists. We probably have different notions of what 'precision' and 'ambiguity' are, and I don't for a moment claim that my notions are applicable to Ceqli. On the level of meaning, Lojlan is precise and unambiguous because (in principle, albeit not always in practise), any sentence can be translated into a formal logical representation, which we know to be precise, unambiguous, and sufficient for representing every sort of meaning. Syntactically, too, Lojlan is unambiguous. So my contention is that for a language to have the potential for achieving this level of precision an unambiguousness, the design process has to start with formal logic and an unambiguous syntax. As it happens, it is a trivially simple exercise to reach that point -- of having speakable logical forms with unambiguous syntax. The challenge is to augment those foundations with devices that add brevity and userfriendliness. But that seems a fundamentally different exercise from that of seeking to create the optimum synthesis of Chinese and English, or more generally of seeking to fashion an optimum blend of the best parts of diverse natlangs, particularly if the primary goal is to create a language that is easy to learn and use. #> I acknowledge that C is an experiment, but I would predict that #> by not taking the route I describe, it would fail to meet the #> goals of being precise and unambiguous. That said, though, #> I imagine that this is fully consistent with Ceqli's 'market #> position', as a clearly engineered language, but one that #> rejects the formal rigour of Loglan in favour of embracing #> certain natlang models. Its closest conlang kin would be, #> say, Acadon and Vorlin. -- That's my impression, at any rate. # #Acadon I don't know about. I'll check it out. Meanwhile, how can I best #-retain- the rigor of Loglan while making it -optional-? If you did want to do that, then based on what I say above, I would recommend taking predicate logic as a starting point, as Loglan did, and, also as a starting point, an unambiguous grammar (on which I could say more if asked). The unambiguity of the grammar of Lojlan was added only as an afterthought, which makes it a bit clunky; if it had been there from the start it could be simpler. You could then either look to create new constructions that abbreviate chunks of logical structure, or else take word combinations that have no legal parse under the core grammar, and use those for the 'rigorless' version of the language. But if I look at where Ceqli is now, its grammar is very similar to English, but miles away from the 'logical' grammar I've been describing, and hence my conviction that this sort of ultralogicality is not something that Ceqli aspires to, because it conflicts with far more important goals of the language. --And.