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Comment by DonbunEf7 | Hacker News Reader

Learn Lojban today: https://mw.lojban.org/papri/la_karda

Lojban is based on predicate and relational logic, and parses unambiguously for both humans and computers, meaning that we can get straight to semantics instead of faffing about with syntax.

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Anytime Lojban comes up I recommend taking a look at linguist Arika Okrent's book "Into the Land of Invented Languages". She learns several conlangs (constructed languages) during the book and has several chapters devoted to the history and her learning of Lojban and some of its pitfalls (some things take a lot of words to say). There's a reason why natural languages have so much ambiguity, so you don't have to write a novel to have a basic conversation. If you go to wikitongues on YouTube you'll see a prominent community member who can only read it and can't speak it...it isn't easy.

Edit: Lojban is ambiguous with how something is said, so when a speaker says something you should never misinterpret the words, but the meaning could be misinterpreted as I understand it. I'm no expert, but would love to see something like this take off.

When it comes to book recommendations I would recommend Umberto Eco's The Search for the Perfect Language.

Speaking of Larry Wall (creator of Perl) above, "the search for the perfect language" is his favorite book I believe.

"""I recommend taking a look at linguist Arika Okrent's book "Into the Land of Invented Languages"""

I used to have that book... I didn't think it was very good. I wanted to learn more about the various conlangs, but instead the author mostly focused on their creators, and then especially their idiosyncrasies and quirks.

For those who want to know more about conlangs, I would recommend "The Language Construction Kit" by Mark Rosenfelder.

The Language Construction Kit is phenomenal and played a huge part in developing my love of conlangs as well as linguistics in general.

The Language Construction Kit is great from everything I've read. Yes her book is more on the history & pro/cons of various conlangs mixed with examples...etc. It's not supposed to teach you Klingon, Lojban, Esperanto, and several others all in one book.

An aside - the brilliant Star Trek episode Darmok [1] shows the importance of the shared cultural context in which communication happens. [2] is a snippet of the episode where the crew is perplexed by the "language" of the "Tamarians".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-wzr74d7TI

But it is only the syntax that is unambiguous in Lojban -- the semantics (which in the real world are the cause of most misunderstandings) are pretty much open to as much ambiguity as any other language. The Lojban word for love, "prami" covers love of one's spouse, love of one's children and love of one's pets, much as "love" does in English. These are obviously very different feelings.

> parses unambiguously for both humans and computers

I suspect this is only because there are so few speakers of Lojban. As soon as a language is in common use, it will be extended naturally by the users. I doubt any level of consistency can be enforced over time in that case. Popular slang and idioms generally make it into a language if they persist long enough. Good luck keeping unambiguous parsing in that case.

Exactly. When you have a language no one actually realistically speaks, you can stuff whatever highfalutin ideas you want into it.

Just look at JavaScript

JavaScript cannot be ambiguous because there's a constant acid test: Does the machine find it ambiguous? If it does, it fails to parse. (If it parses, it wasn't ambiguous, but it still might mean something the programmer didn't intend.) That property will hold until we do something like embedding AI in the compiler.

Humans can deal with ambiguity. There are various reasons for humans to want to be ambiguous, and any natural language has to support that to be useful for day-to-day conversation. Loglan and Lojban might well escape that, if they're only ever used in contexts where ambiguity is not desired and will be repaired if it is found.

Think formal specifications, not love letters.

Isn't the automated insertion of semicolons to your detrimemt a result of ambiguity in the language, and the compiler forced to decide

The rules for automatic semicolon insertion are defined by the language spec.

I think the value of Lojban/Loglan in this space is having a language that a human can use to have a more natural interaction between themselves and computers. And also as a layer for translating formulaic text between natural languages.

Lojban has a central planning committee, the BPFK, so there is no danger of "Proper Lojban" falling prey to this, although certainly there have been dialects of Lojban in the past which deliberately were not parseable. They don't last long; none of the Lojban tools work with their experiments, so network effects tend to keep unparseable dialects from becoming popular.

From the beginning, Lojban's design has included this feature. It would be pointless to learn as a language if you intend to extend it in that way.

There are, of course, ways to experimentally extend the language grammatically, as well as a process for changing the grammar, which has happened before via the BPFK. It evolves, but with planning and consideration.

Semantics is never fully unambiguous, because of its interface with pragmatics, which Lojban doesn't deal with at all. There is no systematic way to unambiguously convey tone, register, etc.

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