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In a message dated 6/5/2002 12:04:24 PM Central Daylight Time, a-rosta@hidden.email writes:But currently there are many cases where there is no agreed way We disagree on most of that, of course. That is, I know rules that I think are the ones that Lojban explicitly or implicitly requires and you don't think they are in Lojban in any way or that they are the right rules. I think we do agree that leaving the issue to "usage" is hopeless. <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.> I wouldn't call it a flaw in Lojban either since it has nothing to do with Lojban's (or Loglan's) design goals. It is a flaw if you want to use Lojban to be logical and precise and transparent about it, but I can't think why anyone would expect Lojban to be that. Nonetheless, it does turn out -- because of the underlying syntax from formal logic -- that Lojban is as good or better at these tasks than any other developed language. Livagian etc may well, when done, be better, but I doubt that will be by much -- if they are usable languages (some slop is inherent just in human communication). <ICONICITY. This can manifest itself in various ways, such as seeking a nonarbitrary association between morpheme and meaning, or in seeking a wide ranging system whereby words with similar meanings have similar sounds.> I find this quaint (as in old-fashioned, e.g., Cratylus): associations between morphemes and meanings are almost be definition arbitrary (even for onomatopoeia). So, it comes down to the second, which just means having a rich variety of derivational techniques and probably looks off, Platonically again, to semantic primes and combinatoric constructions. Yuck! |