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Comment by skermes | Hacker News Reader

Descended from Loglan, whence came the old joke,

How many Loglan speakers does it take to fix a broken light bulb?

Two. One to fix it, and another to figure out what kind of bulb emits broken light.

In all seriousness, though, one of the things I treasure most about our squishy human languages is how much ambiguity they contain. Being able to construct sentences that mean two (or three, or more) things at once and playing around with the intersections of polysemy (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2079) and listener context is great fun. I feel like you lose some of that when you take inspiration for your language as much from predicate calculus as from Chinese.

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"Lojban's powerful tanru (combinations of selbri into novel concepts) and word-building features make it easy to make fine distinctions between concepts. This discourages the tendency for individual words to acquire families of meanings. Lojban's tanru metaphors are themselves ambiguous; they specify a relationship between concepts, but not what the relationship is. That relationship can be made explicit using unambiguous logical constructs if necessary, or can be left vague, as the speaker typically desires. Similarly, portions of the logical structure of a Lojban expression can be omitted, greatly simplifying the expression while causing some ambiguity. Unlike in the natural languages, though, this ambiguity is readily identified by a reader or listener. Thus all ambiguity in Lojban is constrained and recognizable, and can be clarified as necessary by further interaction.

This precision in no way confines the meaning of a Lojban sentence. It is possible to be fanciful or ridiculous, to tell lies, or to be misunderstood. You can be very specific, or you can be intentionally vague. Your hearer may not understand what you meant, but will always understand what you said."

http://www.lojban.org/publications/level0/brochure/lojbanmo....

Lojban has all of the wordplay and fun constructions of any natural spoken language. The difference is just that it parses cleanly. This means you can actually create richer constructions that are arbitrarily cleverly convoluted... you just have to hope the reader has enough stack space in his head to parse it!

Personally, I won't miss the self-parodies in English like the sentence "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo...)

> one of the things I treasure most about our squishy human languages is how much ambiguity they contain

Agreed. Designed languages lack...poetry.

I understand that you mean "poetry" in the metaphorical, not literal sense. Still the point about literal poetry being possible in Lojban is an important one:

"Original poetry has already been written in Lojban, and some has been translated into the language. Lojban's powerful tanru metaphor structure allows you to build concepts into words easily, as you need them, and has been used to create colorful images and to convey moving emotions. A Lojban speaker doesn't need a dictionary to use and understand millions of words that can potentially exist in the language. The absence of cultural constraints makes consideration of new ideas and relationships easier than in natural languages, spurring creativity. Lojban aids in communicating abstractions by identifying their nature explicitly. Lojban is thus a very powerful language, not only for poetry, but for discussing such abstract fields as philosophy, physics, metaphysics, and religion.

Lojban poets are already experimenting with new (and old) forms of poetry that seem especially well suited to the rhythm, sound, and flow of the language. Rarely do poets have such an opportunity to affect the development of a new language as they now can with Lojban. Lojban's rich and powerful. Lojban unleashes the full potential of poetic expression to communicate both concrete and abstract ideas."

http://www.lojban.org/publications/level0/brochure/lojbanmo....

> Lojban unleashes the full potential of poetic expression

Whoever wrote that is lying to himself and others. Please refer to my lower post (the one containing "wherefore art thou Romeo?") for a partial but sufficient explanation.

False. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=lojban+poetry

Thanks for proving my point about ambiguity.

And p.s.-- that's not poetry, it's "poetry"

It's more of a proof of concept than high literature -- keep in mind that Lojban is a very young language, and there aren't many people even truly fluent in it.

Any language's poetry draws its meaning, its form, its essence from the words of those millions of people who expressed their ideas and themselves in that language. No contrived language is ever going to be able to express a thought with the same weight, for example, that "wherefore art thou Romeo?" is expressed in English. It's just not possible, and translated meaning isn't enough. You will never have Giants' shoulders to stand on.

Translated meaning isn't enough? So I suppose all those translations of Shakespeare in to hundreds of human languages isn't enough either; and anyone who claims Shakespeare can be appreciated in anything but English is just "lying to himself and others" (as you said in an earlier post).

Sure, any young language isn't going to have a rich history of expressions weighed down with meaning. But I don't think that has anything to do with whether the language is deliberately invented or not. With time, assuming the language is used by a significant number of people, it will acquire such a history.

Still, while young languages don't have a rich history compared to older languages, they have other advantages (of which Lojban has plenty).

Also remember that the history that has accrued to older languages is a double-edged sword. Because of this "baggage" it's sometimes difficult to express precisely what you mean without being misunderstood (or perhaps to even know what you mean -- see the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). Lojban is designed to help overcome such difficulties.

The other thing to note is that the weighty phrases like "wherefore art thou Romeo?" aren't used very much in everyday speech. It's not like we go around constantly quoting Shakespeare at one another (except occasionally for effect, or humor). We generally communicate using rather simple language and concepts that should have no problem being expressed in even a young (but expressive) language like Lojban.

>So I suppose ... anyone who claims Shakespeare can be appreciated in anything but English is just "lying to himself and others" (as you said in an earlier post).

It cannot be appreciated to the same degree, no. Just as a 6-year-old cannot appreciate Shakespeare to the same degree that a 50-year-old English literature professor can appreciate it. How this is at all debatable, I have no idea.

> With time, assuming the language is used by a significant number of people, it will acquire such a history.

This will of course never happen.

> Still, while young languages don't have a rich history compared to older languages, they have other advantages (of which Lojban has plenty).

There are alternative solutions to requiring everyone to learn a second language. For example, expressing oneself more clearly. This can be accomplished to any desired degree in modern languages.

> Also remember that the history that has accrued to older languages is a double-edged sword. Because of this "baggage" it's sometimes difficult to express precisely what you mean without being misunderstood (or perhaps to even know what you mean -- see the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). Lojban is designed to help overcome such difficulties.

On one edge of the sword: the lasting effects of the most skilled manipulators of the given language. The other edge: occasional difficulties with ambiguity and linguistic relativity. To dull the second edge, Lojban requires that we flatten the first. No thanks.

  > > With time, assuming the language is used by a significant
  > > number of people, it will acquire such a history.
  >
  > This will of course never happen.

"Man flying? Impossible!" "A man walking on the moon? Preposterous!" "Slavery/segregation is the natural state of man and will never change." "The Third Reich will last a thousand years." "The Soviet Union will never collapse in our lifetime."

History is full of surprises.

Sure, today Lojban is a fringe language with a few thousand speakers, tops. And there's no indication of any kind of widespread movement to adopt it. But that could change with time. The language is really in its infancy.

Of course, it's not likely it'll ever be as popular as any of the major natural languages are today, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people speaking it (or a future offspring of it) one day.

Every one of your listed false predictions held within it an inherently great value to prove wrong, a value so enormous and ungodly that anywhere from thousands to billions of spirited men and women pushed everything else in their lives aside for that one cause. They made that choice to give their lives singular purpose because the importance of the goals they pursued necessitated nothing less, and what they knew to be potentially massive benefit to all mankind outweighed everything else in their lives.

This goal of millions of speakers of Lojban would require that same monumental level of collective human effort and perseverance, but it does not necessitate anything of that kind to anyone, nor will it ever, because the potential benefit to mankind is just that marginal.

This argument also means poetry is better in languages spoken by lots of people, in countries with rich history, and later poetry is better than earlier one all other things being equal...

All other things are never equal.

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