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pc: > a-rosta@hidden.email writes: > Besides pred-arg structure, there is variable binding > and scope relations. I think that suffices. > > But Lojban has both of those pretty much under control, except for a > vague right end rule on quantifiers, and some uncertainty about the > status of lambda variables and indirect questions (which logicians > haven't got well worked out either). What I/we were saying is that logical structures are in themselves pretty simple. As for Lojban, Lojban has no difficulty in taking a logical formula and expressing it in Lojban. But that's not too difficult a task. But currently there are many cases where there is no agreed way to take a Lojban sentence and translate into a logical formula. Even where interpretive conventions have been proposed to deal with such cases, they remain proposals, waiting for usage to carve them into the language. > That no on has laid out the > algorithm for converting Lojban sentences into logical structures is > probably more a sign of distraction of logicians than of flaws in > Lojban (so far as we can tell, anyhow). It wouldn't be fair to call it a flaw of Lojban, since it's all really a consequence of the primary goal of Lojban, which was to get a version of Loglan baselined as quickly as possible and begin to build a community of users. Had that goal not overridden others, then the goal of logicality could have been better achieved, ideally by scrapping Loglan and starting from scratch, or, failing that, at least by handing over the job of working out syntaxt-to-logic mappings to the designers rather than to usage. To put my views of Lojban in context, it seems to me to be to loglangs as Esperanto is to auxlangs, in that even relative to their declared goals, they are highly flawed. But it is they that actually have a community of committed users. So, if you want to actually use a loglang to communicate with other people, choose Lojban. But if you want an optimally designed loglang, forget Lojban and start from scratch. My views on this are not really dissonant with the great majority of the Lojban community. --And.