Loglan – a predicate logic-based language for humans

That will be Ithkuil with its weird complex rules and alien writing system made from a vast character set.

It's more like Prolog with a maximum arity of 5 and about a thousand particles with complicated effects. The reference text says with some pride that it is "as simple as C++."

Or perl.

When I say "I talk to you" in English it's non-optional to have a temporal tense (the above is in the present) but optional to have a spatial tense (you don't know where it is happening).

In lojban you can say "mi do tavla" (or "mi tavla do") and that doesn't specifically give the temporal or spatial tenses. But you can add both to any degree.

So "mi pu tavla do" means I spoke to you in the past, "mi puzu tavla" means it was a long way in the past, and so on.

More details: https://lojban.github.io/cll/10/1/

{mlatu} "kitty!"

{oi mabla skami} "Ugh, fucking computers."

{po'o fi'ure lo ro pipno ku zasti} "Only half of all pianos exist."

{cicricfoi bartu} "It's a jungle out there."

{lo se tsarainaitrusi'o ku ta'e na'e pensi} "Fascists typically aren't thinking."

{za'a bridi} "I observe the nature of some logical relation, probably uttered or written somewhere."

The tense-space system is a good example. By default, a sentence like "mi tavla"/"I talk" doesn't convey any temporal information. But you could add a tense particle like "pu": "mi pu tavla"/"I [past] talked". But that doesn't really tell you how long ago it was, so maybe you want to add "zi" to indicate that it was recently that you spoke: "mi pu zi tavla"/"I [past] [recent] talked" which might be interpreted as "I was just talking". But where were you doing that? Perhaps you were just talking downstairs, so you'd add "ni'a" to indicate that it was below: "mi pu zi ni'a tavla"/"I [past] [recent] [down] talked" -> "I was just talking down there". But maybe you do this all the time? Let's add "ta'e" to indicate habitually. "mi pu zi ni'a ta'e tavla"/"I [past] [recent] [down] [habitually] talked" -> "I used to talk down there all the time". But maybe I want you to know it was kind of a problem or that I did it too much? In that case let's add "za'o" to indicate that the event went on too long: "mi pu zi ni'a ta'e za'o tavla" -> "I used to habitually talk down there too much."

I like this example because: 1) I've only used four or five of the 28 sections of Chapter 10: Imaginary Journeys, which concerns the tense system, 2) this is only the tense system, not any of the copious other systems Lojban has 3) this shows you the kind of particle-soup that I think Lojban can easily devolve into, and 4) eventually, a real Lojbanist will arrive and correct everything I said above, which is an important part of the real flavor of the language. Being less snarky, my suspicion is that there is a real art in choosing which information to add, since none of it is obligatory (unlike English), and it is quite possible to add information in Lojban which would require additional clauses in English, that makes it an interesting mental exercise to interpret.

How so?

> {ti'e} "I hear that..." a marker for unverifiable hearsay > {da'i} "supposing..." a marker for counterfactuals

Isn't there a language spoken in Africa with a similar concept? I remember vaguely that there was a minor scandal some years ago because a politician said something like "Unfortunately, we couldn't finish the project in time" and the translator used the wrong form, so it sounded like they never intended to do so.

I'm quite familiar with lojban, thank you. And you must have a high bar for content if a critique is considered a "shitpost."

Syntax and morphology are largely solved problems at the frontier of NLP. If you think that this is not the case, then I must ask by what metric do you make that judgement? We have machines that are able to transcribe human speech and infer intent with lower error rates than humans for the same task. QED.

Formal semantics was hard at the time that loglans were codified. It was hard until very recently in fact. But that is no longer the case: Davidsonian event semantics is now expressive enough to give exact, unambiguous semantics for every desired utterance. There are still many unsolved problems in the field of semantics, but they are problems of the sort "what's the best way to represent..." not "how do we reconcile the two main theories giving totally opposite results."

For an overview of the modern state of formal semantics I suggest this work, which successfully dissolved the last lingering major conflicts in the field:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10988-014-9162-...