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Re: [engelang] Re: Logical Structure vs. Syntactic Structure



In a message dated 6/10/2002 10:20:18 AM Central Daylight Time, arosta@hidden.email writes:


From the outset, the Lojban project took the view that it was better
to have a half-baked loglang that was actively used by a sizable
community  than to have a fully-baked loglang that was never
actually used for communication.


Well, it did not take this view, mainly because it never considered this choice.  Its gaol was to devise a language that would be a complete human language but would have a markedly different -- and simpler -- structure from familiar languages.  It happened to take as the base for that structure first order predicate logic (JCB knew a bit of this from classes Broadbeck -- but not much).  It might have tried the syntax of COBOL or some other computer language just as easily (except JCB never was much of a computerist, especially in the early days -- but then, who was?). Any notion of some further connection with logic was a later addition, probably after the 1975 publication.  It is not in 1960 or 1962.

<It's fair to say that the Lojban project is succeeding very well with
its avowed aims, and that as a loglang it is half-baked. >

Well, half-baked is probably an underestimate.  I think it is much better than that.  But then, I think English is at least half-baked and probably better too.  Neither is finished to &'s specifications -- or any other specification of what logical or semantic form should be, at least partly because no two people (well, cliques) agree on what that is.