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Comment by The_rationalist | Hacker News Reader

Only a Subset of features of natural langage introduce ambiguities, equivocations, etc. It is perfectly doable to force one and only one meaning per keyword (just like do programming keywords already (if, while, etc), removing the ability to use coreferences, etc I would love to see a great constrained English, formal without the readability and expressivity loss of formal symbolic grammars / formal maths

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>Only a Subset of features of natural langage introduce ambiguities, equivocations, et

I wish! People won't even use "literally" consistently, despite it existing to prevent you having to guess which sense a speaker means.

Edit: Toned down.

People love to pick on the intensive meaning of "literally", perhaps because it is more recent, but it's really not much different from the range of uses of "really", which also can mean both 'in fact, truly' as well as an intensifier sense like 'very'. E.g. "I was really shocked", "I was literally shocked" have similar ambiguities. Competent human speaker generally provide enough context that potential ambiguities aren't too problematic -- for other human beings, if not for machines.

Human languages are more ambiguous than you might imagine, and lexical things like 'what meaning of "literally" is the speaker using' are pretty tip-of-the-iceberg stuff. (Think about what "Every man wants to read some book" or "the girl saw the man with the binoculars" (can) mean.)

Well, lojban tried.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

Sounds like you are looking for Legal-ese.

Even legal-ese can be ambiguous. If it weren't then courts would never overturn other courts' rulings.

'Only a subset'? What does that mean?

That means that natural language is not intrinsically ambiguous and fuzzy, and removing the features that cause ambiguities would create a Constrained natural language, far more clearer. Or is it the word Subset that you want me to explain?

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