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And Rosta wrote: > > The whole point of a grammar is to map sentence-sounds to > sentence-meanings. Any so-called grammar that doesn't do that is not a > grammar, and its claims to be unambiguous are hollow. > I agree. However, a sentence that is unambiguous can still be vague. For example, if I say "I own a boat", I am NOT being ambiguous, but I AM being vague because I'm not saying which boat I own. If I say "Every man owns a boat", I am NOT being ambiguous but I AM being vague because I'm not specifying which boat is owned by each man. This distinction also applies to syntax. Thus, syntactic ambiguity occurs ONLY when it is impossible to generate one and only one correct parse tree of a sentence, even if the result is semantically vague. Thus, both Loglan and Lojban are syntactically unambiguous (as is Katanda, of course :-). Of course, periphrasis can always be used to reduce or eliminate vagueness, but this should not be a requirement of the grammar. Any language that claims to completely lack vagueness will be so verbose and complex that it will be useless (assuming it's even possible to create such a monster). > > It is not asking too much of an engelang that it have a real grammar, > for, thanks to logicians, we already know and understand the structure > of sentence-meanings. So the goal of the loglang inventor is to take > logical structures as the starting point and work out the most > efficient way of encoding them so as to satisfy the other design > goals. > Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be using "loglang" and "engilang" as synonyms. I thought the whole point of coining the word "engilang" was so that we can make a distinction between the two. Regards, Rick Morneau http://www.srv.net/~ram http://www.eskimo.com/~ram