Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication
mw.lojban.org
mw.lojban.org
There are other logical languages out there. Most of them are in development, and are discussed in a Discord called the "Logical Languages Lodge". However there is another called Toaq that is almost complete, it at least as complete as Lojban (its vocabulary is still growing, but all of the essential words are there, and the grammar and semantics are complete). If you wish to learn a logical language in 2023, that's the one I'd suggest.
That makes it a hard-pass from me
Honest question...why?
If there is anyone out there who likes the idea of Lojban but want something more practical and with a firmer foundation to boot, contact me. I’ve got ideas and I’d love to find some people to work on this with.
I was also a little disappointed to learn that it is morphologically ambiguous without proper inflection (syllabic emphasis).
Other than that its an amazing language, as is Loglan.
I only wish it sounded a bit better. It sounds a bit slavic, where as I find languages like Arabic and Italian much more pleasing to the ear.
If you say "My coworker Taro is a samurai", what does that mean? Did he dress up as a samurai for the office costume party? Does he study older forms of Japanese martial arts? Was he descended from a noble family from the Japanese feudal era and have claim to an actual samurai title?
There are controlled dialects of English, like E-Prime, which forbid the use of the copula "to be" as ungrammatical, or at least heavily restrict it. You can say your coworker "dressed as a samurai", "trains in the arts of a samurai", or "traces ancestral lineage from a samurai clan", but you can't say he "is a samurai" in E-Prime.
Would this make communication more clear with fewer mistakes? I don't think this has been adequately studied enough to say for certain. But at least in certain domains like military speech and air traffic control we have examples of such enforced language simplification resulting in measurable decreases in miscommunications. I'm very curious to see if we can generalize those results to a full, general-purpose dialect or entirely new language.
I’m not sure I’d characterise these as ‘mistakes’, per se. They’re just a consequence of the fact that the copula is multifunctional — just like every other English word. In fact, you could similarly criticise almost any common word: ‘go’, ‘from’, ‘good’, ‘like’, ‘not’…
Exercise: try stating this without the copula.
But no, "is/are" is not multifunctional in the same way that "from" is. If I say "she came from school" it is clear that we're talking about relative motion today or in the recent past from one nearby location to another. If I say "her family came from Japan" it is clear I'm talking about ancestry and/or a long ago emigration, but also spatially oriented. If I say "the party is from 3pm to 5pm" then I am using "from" to indicate a temporal rather than a spatial motion. But it still conveys the same basic meaning in all these cases, as the origin point of a motion or interval, and it is not usually the case that a single usage of the word could be confused for more than one meaning.
The IS-A vs HAS-A relationship is entirely different. It is the difference between existential quantification (some aspect of this thing resembles/has an X) and universal quantification (the entirety of this thing is fully captured by the meaning of X). Rigorously analyzed these are very different claims. In a strongly typed language they couldn't be substituted for each other.
To make this concrete, if I say "he is bad" then it is unclear whether I am saying that person is an intrinsically bad man, or if I am just commenting that the thing that he is doing right now is not morally justified.
This may seem like splitting hairs, but that's rather the point. It's at the edge of what we are comfortable thinking about in everyday life. But how much of that is because the language that we use--English--doesn't have these distinctions built into its very foundation? If we were native speakers of a E-Prime, maybe this distinction would be obvious and trivial. And maybe, just maybe, we wouldn't let politicians and con men off the hook so easily for equivocating language.
‘The copula has many uses.’
or:
‘The copula can be used in many different situations.’
-----
Also, I think you underestimate the amount of variation in other words, e.g.:
> If I say "she came from school" it is clear that we're talking about relative motion today or in the recent past from one nearby location to another.
Not just recent past, but having any time near to the point of reference: ‘When she came from school after the bomb scare…’.
> If I say "her family came from Japan" it is clear I'm talking about ancestry and/or a long ago emigration, but also spatially oriented.
Or they might have arrived yesterday to visit her.
> If I say "the party is from 3pm to 5pm" then I am using "from" to indicate a temporal rather than a spatial motion.
But only because ‘3pm’ and ‘5pm’ themselves have clear temporal reference as opposed to spatial reference. For an ambiguous example, if I say ‘we drove from breakfast to lunch’, that might mean we drove starting at breakfast-time and finishing at lunch-time, or it might mean we started at a location where we had breakfast and drove to a location where we had lunch. (To more fully show that the latter is a valid interpretation, consider ‘we drove from breakfast to breakfast’: it makes no sense if ‘breakfast’ is a time, but it makes sense if treated with the sense of ‘place where we had breakfast’.)
-----
> The IS-A vs HAS-A relationship is entirely different. It is the difference between existential quantification (some aspect of this thing resembles/has an X) and universal quantification (the entirety of this thing is fully captured by the meaning of X).
This doesn’t sound quite right to me. In my view, both ‘has’ and ‘is’ are basically relationships, rather than quantifiers. Consider a sentence like ‘I have the keys’: this merely states a relationship between two objects, rather than quantifying over any set. A sentence like ‘The morning star is the evening star’ is similar in this regard. It is true that a sentence like ‘I have a key’ has existential meaning — but I suspect the quantification is linked to the indefinite article ‘a’ more than the verb.
> To make this concrete, if I say "he is bad" then it is unclear whether I am saying that person is an intrinsically bad man, or if I am just commenting that the thing that he is doing right now is not morally justified.
This ambiguity isn’t limited to the copula, though. ‘I like him’ has exactly the same kind of ambiguity.
Unless we mean that she came from one school of philosophy or art to another. Or she came from the school long ago to move somewhere else.
> If I say "her family came from Japan" it is clear I'm talking about ancestry and/or a long ago emigration
Unless her family came from Japan as part of a cruise before going to Thailand. Or her family moved out of Japan because they were American military stationed in Okinawa.
Getting rid of copula gets rid of only a small portion of the ambiguity in natural language.
This is useful and often good enough, because a) the rest of what's been said and situational context will help home in on more specific associations (and if not, one can always ask for clarification), and b) we often don't need to resolve specific ideas - "my friend is a samurai" may just be an invitation for the other person to reply "oh, fun, speaking of more ancient cultures, have you read about ...", and then continue jumping around big clusters of associations, without ever properly resolving any.
However, we have whole judicial systems that spend a non-trivial fraction of their time interpreting legal verbiage. So clearly it falls short at least some of the time, otherwise courts could be, in part, automated away. Maybe that's because it's too hard or not possible with natural languages? Or the legalese ruleset just isn't refined enough?
tl;dr cognitive ambiguities and changing circumstances are what make this hard, not language as a medium
Wouldn’t any constructed/logical language (is that the right term?) also be susceptible to unpredictable future developments?
In fact, as Florian Cajori stated in his book "A History of Mathematical Notations", the rise of mathematical notation was opposed by people who preferred the older, natural language style of doing mathematics, what Cajori termed the "struggle between symbolists and rhetoricians."
So, yes, logic is mathematics, and humans did mathematics in natural language for a very long time before we invented the conlang of mathematical notation. Moving more of the ideas into what is, ultimately, a more expressive notation is not a fundamental shift.
Formal semantics is a broad field full of some very interesting and practical theories, and a lot of quackery. I don't blame you for being skeptical. Specifically though I think that Lucas Champollion has done a great job of marrying Davidsonian event semantics with more modern work on qualifiers and counterfactuals that finally creates--I believe--an universal framework for capturing the full meaning of any speech utterance:
https://champollion.hosting.nyu.edu
If I am correct in this assessment, then the next logical step from a conlang/auxlang perspective is: can we build a direct, unambiguous spoken grammar for this universal semantics framework? If so, then we will have achieved what Lojban failed to even attempt: unambiguous meaning.
OK, I’ll email you if you want to continue this discussion elsewhere.
> https://champollion.hosting.nyu.edu
Looks interesting… where should I start reading?
> If I am correct in this assessment, then the next logical step from a conlang/auxlang perspective is: can we build a direct, unambiguous spoken grammar for this universal semantics framework? If so, then we will have achieved what Lojban failed to even attempt: unambiguous meaning.
Personally, I’m not sure if ‘unambiguous meaning’ is possible or even desirable. Even if formal semantics allows us to achieve complete unambiguity when it comes to grammatical categories (quantifiers, temporal and spatial setting, etc.), I think it would be exceedingly difficult to make every single lexeme completely unambiguous. And even if this were achieved, I’m not sure if such a language would even be usable by humans. Still, it would be an interesting experiment!
> Looks interesting… where should I start reading?
IIRC he did some graduate summer schools that were recorded online and have attached lecture notes. Those plus the referenced papers would be a good place to start. The one in particular that I'm thinking of is, I believe, the Summer 2014 topic of "Integrating Montague Semantics and Event Semantics." That marriage of Davidsonian and Montague semantics into a single framework is, I believe, a universal theory of semantics. [It should be noted that he makes no such grandiose claims.]
> Personally, I’m not sure if ‘unambiguous meaning’ is possible or even desirable
By 'unambiguous meaning' I mean something more specific than the words alone imply. [I am aware of the irony.]
In computational semantics, the goal is to transform a parsing of a sentence into a logical statement (or in the case of a question, a query) about the world. For example, the sentence "every dog barks" would be translated into a logical statement of the form "for every dog there exists at least one barking event with that dog as the acting subject." Or rather a mathematical statement to that effect that I don't know how to render on HN.
But unfortunately in natural language even when a language is correctly parsed in terms of syntax--which is all Lojban seeks to accomplish--there are still many different possible semantic implications. For example, the sentence "Spot didn't bark" could mean
1. There is no event in which Spot has ever barked, or 2. In the case of a specific event, Spot did not bark.
English doesn't differentiate without clarification, e.g. "Spot never barks" or "Spot didn't bark that time." Lojban has universal and existential quantifiers, but their use is not mandated.
When I say I want unambiguous meaning, I mean something very specific: monoparsing of sentences to logical statements/semantic formalisms. There ought to be a one-to-one mapping between sentences in the language, and logical sentences in this universal formalism. The claims of those sentences could be as broad or narrow as desired, but there shouldn't be any ambiguity about what is being claimed.
Emailed, though I’m not sure how much time I’d actually have available to collaborate.
> The one in particular that I'm thinking of is, I believe, the Summer 2014 topic of "Integrating Montague Semantics and Event Semantics."
I’ll have a look at it, thanks!
> When I say I want unambiguous meaning, I mean something very specific: monoparsing of sentences to logical statements/semantic formalisms. There ought to be a one-to-one mapping between sentences in the language, and logical sentences in this universal formalism. The claims of those sentences could be as broad or narrow as desired, but there shouldn't be any ambiguity about what is being claimed.
OK, this makes far more sense. I still maintain there will be a lot of ambiguity, purely because the individual words themselves are ambiguous, but it’s an interesting goal nonetheless.
> OK, this makes far more sense. I still maintain there will be a lot of ambiguity, purely because the individual words themselves are ambiguous, but it’s an interesting goal nonetheless.
I think we are in agreement. There are two definitions of ambiguity in play here. There is logical ambiguity, which I want to eliminate, in which a sentence can be parsed in multiple, contradictory ways. And then there is ambiguity due to imprecision, in which words have broad meaning and without context or clarification a given sentence parsed to a single logical statement can nevertheless have multiple distinct interpretations. That's ok.
Yeah, I can agree with all of this. (Although Anna Wierzbicka’s work on the ‘Natural Semantic Language’ is an attempt to control the latter sort of ambiguity… you might find it quite interesting, actually.)
> 1. There is no event in which Spot has ever barked, or 2. In the case of a specific event, Spot did not bark.
Or maybe even a third case:
3. There exists an event in which Spot did not bark.
English pragmatic usage would make this interpretation rare, but you could still imagine a case in which it was valid.
For example, suppose that Spot normally barks 100% of the time (and never sleeps?).
Then there is a fortunate day in which Spot only barked 70% of the time, and was quiet 30% of the time.
Someone who witnessed this might say "Spot didn't bark [today]!" to emphasize the unusual event, even though Spot did bark the majority of the time on that day.
I just mean to distinguish this from your second case because I think in the second case the "specific event" is possibly already one which is known to the listener or already under discussion.
Just to wrap my head around your definition of universal and unambiguous here. If the language cant nail down the definition of dog to something all parties agree on, would the claim still be unambigous?
Original English: "I heard of the TinyStories research project that unlocked cognitive capabilities in LLMs with fewer parameters. I wonder if something similar would be possible with lojban?"
Lojban round trip English: "We interpret the use of the LLM as a way to confuse the knowledge from TinyStories.gy, which is greater than that from the experimental findings. I find it amusing to use Lojban instead. Does the ability to confuse the experimental findings also mean the ability to confuse Lojban?"
> Lojban means different things to different people
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
Of course, it's still possible to use Lojban to express statements that have an ambiguous or unclear meaning.
nTime vFlies avLike an nArrow, nFruit vFlies avLike a nBanana
Words in Hungarian have specific endings that change their "grammatical type" (I forget the grammatical term for that... part of speech?)
Some examples:
1. "-ás/-és": Transforms a verb into a noun that denotes an action or a profession. For example, the verb "tanul" (to study) becomes "tanulás" (study or studying).
2. "-ó/-ő": Converts a verb into a noun that refers to a person who does the action. For example, "tanít" (to teach) becomes "tanító" (teacher).
3. "-hat/-het": Added to a verb to form a new verb indicating possibility or permission. For example, "olvas" (reads) turns into "olvas-hat" (may/can read).
4. "-tlan/-tlen": When attached to a noun, it creates an adjective expressing the lack of something. For example, "szín" (color) becomes "színtelen" (colorless).
5. "-i": Added to a noun to create an adjective indicating origin or belonging. For example, "Amerika" (America) becomes "amerikai" (American).
6. "-ol": Attached to nouns to form verbs. This is often used with foreign words in Hungarian, like "ghosting-ol", "bullying-ol", "coworking-ol".
Additionally, in Hungarian these suffixes can be combined, so if you want to use the English noun "ghosting" as a noun in Hungarian, you still actually have to add the suffixes, so you would say "ghosting-ol-ás".
> The original Hungarian notation was invented by Charles Simonyi, a programmer who worked at Xerox PARC circa 1972–1981, and who later became Chief Architect at Microsoft. The name of the notation is a reference to Simonyi's nation of origin, and also, according to Andy Hertzfeld, because it made programs "look like they were written in some inscrutable foreign language". Hungarian people's names are "reversed" compared to most other European names; the family name precedes the given name. For example, the anglicized name "Charles Simonyi" in Hungarian was originally "Simonyi Károly". In the same way, the type name precedes the "given name" in Hungarian notation. The similar Smalltalk "type last" naming style (e.g. aPoint and lastPoint) was common at Xerox PARC during Simonyi's tenure there.
> Simonyi's paper on the notation referred to prefixes used to indicate the "type" of information being stored. His proposal was largely concerned with decorating identifier names based upon the semantic information of what they store (in other words, the variable's purpose). Simonyi's notation came to be called Apps Hungarian, since the convention was used in the applications division of Microsoft. Systems Hungarian developed later in the Microsoft Windows development team. Apps Hungarian is not entirely distinct from what became known as Systems Hungarian, as some of Simonyi's suggested prefixes contain little or no semantic information (see below for examples).
---
Simonyi's native language may have had some impact on how he wrote code, but it was not "human language -> write code like Hungarian -> Hungarian notation".
https://www.technologyreview.com/2007/01/01/227178/anything-...
> The resulting code was dense and hard to read. Simonyi’s system came to be known as Hungarian notation, both in homage to its creator’s birthplace and because it made programs “look like they were written in some inscrutable foreign language,” according to programming pioneer Andy Hertzfeld. Hungarian is widely cursed by its detractors. Canadian Java expert Roedy Green has jokingly called it “the tactical nuclear weapon of source code obfuscation techniques.” Mozilla programmer Alec Flett wrote this parody:
prepBut nI vrbLike adjHungarian! qWhat’s artThe adjBig nProblem?One of the books is the language guide to Ithkuil ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil /// https://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Ithkuil-Language-John-Quijada... //// https://youtu.be/x_x_PQ85_0k )
This might fit some of your goals.
> nFruit nFlies vLike a nBanana
Actually, I am not sure that having different meanings of the same word in different contexts is really the problematic part causing ambiguity in conversations.
For example, sarcasm is a much more difficult problem. The words are the same, the meaning of the sentences is the same but the author's intent, the meaning behind those sentences is opposite if they are being sarcastic or not.
Lojban does not eliminate the ambiguity of the meaning of the words, but the ambiguity of its syntactical structure.
To me, the ambiguity of language, and the impracticality to change the meaning of words are the fundamental issues preventing humans to enhance the innate cognitive abilities, and the root cause of most human conflicts around communication.
Any profession and culture has its own jargon, this enables them to express the particular quality of their reality with much more accuracy than common language.
So, instead of trying to build a shared language, what we can do is to create a personal Language for each of us. Not for the purpose of communication, but for the purpose of improving our reasoning and internal model of the world, so we can describe and make sense of our particular reality with much more accuracy.
I've been dedicated to building "Interplanetary mind-map", a tool that supports making your language by making your meaning more explicit. [0]
At the same time, I've been using a prototype of it, to build my personal Language. You can browse into each word and see my particular understanding of it. [1]
[0] - https://github.com/interplanetarymindmap/docs
[1] - https://xavivives.com/#?expr=[%22i12D3KooWBSEYV1cK821KKdfVTH...
Specifically when not defining the ambigous concept „meaning“ and without sketching the assumed mechanism by which they are learned and turned into language.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLn6LC1RpAo [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-unefmAo9k
I even wrote a new course for laymen https://lojban.pw/books/learn-lojban/
Needless to say, few people invest in learning new languages at all.
If you are interested you may join the discord chat
Its also a comedy so I get to have fun playing around with the distinction between "Approved, Proper and Official" languages and words, and their nemeses: the hip, the veil-piercing, the casual, the quickly improvised or intentionally irreverant ones.
When I was a kid I could effortlessly switch back and forth between the two types. Though I felt more natural and at home in the latter. Then as a groan-up in the white-collar workforce, when I was forced to do the whole hours-long, two--way highway commute M-F to spend yet another 8 hours in a drab cubicle, and had to Watch Every Single Thing I Said and Did All Day Long lest some random person take it out-of-context or Find It Offensive, a certain joy for life was... slowly beaten out of me.
I've always been a fan of Lojban, on paper. But I dont see it having a bigger future. English is "good enough" however imperfect.
Less is more strikes again? :-)
----
(1. see my bio: Slartboz)
I started working on a conlang with similar ideas a while back (emojis in the language, machine parsable) but less strict and nicer sounding. Never ended up with anything though :)
I no joke believe that the eventual end state of linguistic evolution is an ideographic written language with emoji as characters.
Of course, if that means the entire world speaks the same language, the price would be worth it.
But I doubt we will converge on anything that is difficult to master, since water takes the path of least resistance.
The reason for this is that nobody except little children actually read by sounding out individual letters of words. That would be too much for the human mind to process in real time. You learn to read by recognizing particular clusters of lines on a paper or screen as having semantic meaning, and your brain translates that directly. The imlpiactoin is the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. (Did you read that OK?)
So essentially, you and a Chinese person both put in the same amount of effort to learn the same number of squiggly lines on paper as having semantic meaning, and memorizing a mapping of squiggles to words. It's just that in English the pronunciation is emphasized in the writing, whereas in Chinese it is mainly the meaning of the word that is focused on. But given that in this age most of our communication is through text which may never even be read aloud, it does make one wonder if the Chinese had the right idea all along.
But if so, rather than use a 3000 year old writing system with a lot of inherited historical baggage, why not start afresh? Keep the same basic concept (digital pictures in squares representing atomistic units of meaning, aligned in sequential order according to a grammar), but allow the pictures to make full benefit of today's digital display and font rendering technology. The logical end result of this is, I believe, emoji. Or something very close to it / evolved from it.
To get an idea of what I mean, you might want to check out Xu Bing's "Book from the Ground", which is a very readable book written in emoji, or something close to it. You can read about his work here:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/emojis-comics-novel-futu...
I’m not sure this can be solely attributed to the difference between character sets.
> The reason for this is that nobody except little children actually read by sounding out individual letters of words. That would be too much for the human mind to process in real time.
This sounds a lot like the theory that justified getting rid of phonics in schools, which has been an unmitigated disaster. It’s also not true when you consider how adult readers approach new words; English in particular isn’t great at this but there’s at least a hope that you’ll know how to pronounce a word you see written down, which approaches certainty in other alphabetic languages. This is useful for cross-referencing between spoken and written language.
> (Did you read that OK?)
Most English readers can mentally correct transposed letters, which is yet more evidence of the resiliency of alphabetic writing.
> But given that in this age most of our communication is through text which may never even be read aloud, it does make one wonder if the Chinese had the right idea all along.
I very much doubt that this is true. It might be true (or seem true) in the weird bubble you and I live in, but it’s not true for the majority of people.
As alphabetic orthographies go, English is almost uniquely horrible, though, so that's hardly surprising. Have they tried comparing to e.g. Spanish?
And yes, when we read with a practiced eye, we do pattern match entire words at once. But it's much easier to get to that point with a simpler, composable writing system - and the advantage of the alphabet (or a syllabary) is that you can still read everything before you get there, just slower. And that's just the reading part - the advantages of a decently phonemic alphabet or syllabary for writing are even more blatant.
It is not. From the moment you learn a character in Chinese you are sight-reading by shape. It doesn't take much practice at all. Every bilingual Chinese-English person I know prefers reading Chinese, no matter how long they have been exposed to both languages as it is less mentally straining. English is my first language and even I experience this to some degree.
There's a reason why Hangul was a big deal in Korea when it was introduced, and why the upper classes tried to actively suppress it - it did, in fact, made reading and writing more accessible to the common folk. The same reasons why it was true then still apply.
The best thing you can do today if you want quick adoption of a language is to use the latin alphabet.
If anything this just reinforces my original point: people consume written text more than they produce it, so we should optimize for that.
Of course there are plenty of languages far better than either, with almost perfect match between spoken and written language. Language changes constantly, after all.
Given events in the last 18 months, instead of a constructed language like Lojban or Esperanto I would vote for a small subset of English with a limited grammar and vocabulary - with tools to enforce both vocabulary and simplified grammar.
Why the change in opinion? It turns out that English works better than many other languages for text embeddings and generally working with Large Language Models. A simplified version of English, perhaps called ‘glish’ would be easy for English speakers to pick up and use with good automatic writing and editing tools. Advantages: make it easier for AI and for casual English users around the world.
I also feel the same way about Esperanto due to its high regularity in syntax.
Part of me also wonders if an ai model could be optimized by training it on a language specifically invented to be both easy for the ai to understand and the human to communicate in. Maybe the language was made up of lots of 4 letter words bringing the number of words to tokens closer to 1:1, or injecting more context per word so sentences could be shorter and use less tokens
This seemed both uselessly idealistic and absurdly user-hostile. I would think that a conlang targeted at global appeal would be based on some combination of Romance languages and Germanic languages, perhaps an ur-version of each (like, Latin and Icelandic). Such a process might bring you a result where the vocabulary was as accessible as English while having immensely better-than-English spelling, grammar, morphology, etc.
So for example, here in Alaska, Athabaskan languages are mostly dead, Yupik and Inupiaq is still around but English is predominant pretty much everywhere except west Alaska and the occasional community. Sugpiaq and Alutiiq are basically gone, Tlingit has a revival but it’s not around, Eyak is dead, etc.
Why don’t we create a blended conlang that can take pieces of each of these languages in the form of vocabulary and grammar - even though they’re very different grammatically and in terms of lexicon, we can make a language that is relatively easy for people to learn because it’s regular, substantially different than English so it’s not “colonizer-tongue” and largely unique to the geography of the place.
You could do the same thing in Europe to create lingua-francas.
I still believe there will be an awesome international auxiliary language that the world will embrace, or rather those who wish to communicate with everyone will embrace. It may currently exist or might yet need to be invented. People are making new ones all the time.
* Was it TNG or am I dreaming?
*edit: Thank you everyone, but it wasn't "Darmok". The humans and the aliens were working, for a long time, on a treaty of sorts because the human language was so confusing and ambiguous and they had to go over every small details, over and over ... Need to re-watch TNG
If I remember correctly, the crew found a loophole using a rule that allowed them to ask for arbitration - they asked for an arbiter from a species that was currently in rather long hibernation.
There were couple episodes in Voyager in which aliens deem humans interesting but lesser, and tries to experiment or study on crews. One that I remember ended up in a ship self destruction, in another the doctor leaving his copy. As to why they didn’t simply ask Borg for a zipped archive, I don’t know.
The Dominion commanders throughout DS9 must have made similar remarks, and so should Cardassians have. Q would outright say so in spite, corrupted Data might. Maybe combination of those? Or maybe I’m just a suboptimal Trekkie :p
LMBTQ movement has came into my mind immediately. I think they would have more success by introducing a new, 'don't care about your sex' pronoun to the language instead of adding a third one that just complicates matters.
I thought it was more of a pro-caring thing than a pro-uncaring thing.
Those focusing too much on the latter are really quite good at bumbling into insulting behavior...
Effective communication involving other people only sometimes overlaps with this subjective-first, transactional approach, the: I care about, I talk about, or All I want is.
(It's a great view for designing a specific type of community, with business-transactional perspective + valuing of tightening subjective logic and avoiding fallacy. Well, this will always result in a specific type of tech community with some special focus on business and economic factors as combined with tech.)
And I guess if we effectively cherry-pick the premise, with straw people assuming their various positions on the stage, we can easily justify a more anonymizing, transactional view of language. "This is how I prefer to view my life, therefore the needed language looks like..."
In this view, language doesn't need all that extra stuff. Keep it direct, functional, logical, and avoid fallacies especially.
But this isn't really getting at the relating capabilities of language for example, like when there are bigger problems at hand and diverse mindsets working together to solve them.
Instead, it ends up bringing minds into silos, as broader personality theory predicts. So the I, I, me, is really more about self-support.
With this view, individuals effectively make relating all about the subjective-them 24/7, and about whether they are good/not good. They see relating with others as "we will each be our best and get what we each want" as if it's a universal creed. The one philosophy that just makes sense. Do others even exist?
And is this actively mean? No. Perhaps a better term is effectively: "passively careless," to borrow a phrase from Sabine Hossenfelder. And even in the subjective-first view it still does not make for a high-quality individual, which is also bad news.
It's unfortunate, because not only does this view raise the stakes on their end with no good reason, creating things like martyrdom issues, but it also perpetuates the avoidance of effective contact with others, effectively making "others" the persistent bête noir.
In English you are obligated to care whether it's a table or the table.
I'm all for languages with optional caring about stuff.
There also are already multiple "neopronouns" [1], and they are frequently ridiculed by those taking issue with "unexpected" (to them) pronoun use). This is also not a new debate, with variants (other than singular they) being in use in limited contexts since the late 18th century. None of the attempts have met more than very limited success, as you can tell from the fact this is still a debate.
This is just gaslighting. People use "they" when they talk in the abstract. No one said sentences like "This is Tom. They is happy." until a few years ago.
No one still says that, because even when semantically singular, “they” remains grammatically plural.
Qapla! Mi prenos mian capelon!
[1] - https://i.sidosi.org/resources/grammar-of-solresol/grammar-o...
Then i immediately realized that the surge of LLMs/AI would rekindle "Bable-17"-style ideas...
In fact, this means that there is no such thing as “free speech” in any totally-consistent language!
- first you need your words to have only one meaning. You can even use an existing vocabulary, like English, or Esperanto.
- then you need to be express math/logic/structured programming.
> - first you need your words to have only one meaning
There's your answer. There is no such language, there are no such words. It's questionable if it's even possible - to me, it sounds like a category error. "Words" aren't keys in a hash table, and "meaning" isn't a discrete thing.
> now you have a language without any ambiguity. If there are some ambiguity in the objects/concepts that you are referring, then use your language more to specify the object.
Thing is, I don't think ambiguity comes from language. Concepts and categories are naturally fuzzy for us. Precision is a continuum.
If you need to express something more precisely than your language allows with single word or term, you just create a new word and attach a long-form description to it to position and connect it to other words in the latent^H^H^H^H^H^H^H concept space. That's how we always did it, and it was never hard.
Yet linguists seem to aim for a language that eliminates ambiguity (see TFA). Where am I wrong?
When does a bear stop (or start) being a bear? The 'bear goo' quickly boils down to "what you believe in" and that (surprise!) people have different views, even if we restrict "bear" to only living individuals of the family Ursidae--is it a bear from the time of conception, or even before that, or maybe only at or some time after birth, or always, or never?
Of course you could be more specific--pa vizyci'ojvemrojvesofyjvericparcribe, for example--but now it takes forever to say anything, and you'll lose some of the audience--"the magistrates however replied that they had forgotten the things which had been spoken at the beginning"--and you can probably still find someone for whom the "nearby young and dead and soviet and tree-climbing bear" is still a bit too fuzzy, or anyways there will be people who will disagree with (or ignore) whatever arbitrary definition of bear you've cooked up. Maybe there are two such bears, or they'll quibble that a corpse is clearly not a bear, or they'll happily modify your oh-so-precise definition to mean something else, if you know what I mean, nudge nudge wink wink say no more because The Algorithm plusgoods discussions about bears, and so they use 'bear' to talk about something else while still collecting all those sweet, sweet plusgoods.
Also, lojban does not eliminate ambiguity, zo'e co'e be do'e zu'i, but we're za'o into nunribypevykreborvi'u. A shaved bear would be less fuzzy?
Once thought is encoded in language, it's in a lossy symbolic domain. It's in a messy shared vector space. And every human decoder unpacks the embeddings differently.
So, you may solve the ambiguity problem by introducing a huge numbers of words, that could help a LLM, but humans need a relatively small vocabulary tailored to everyday use. So the tradeoff is reducing ambiguity and not increasing a lot the vocabulary.
(1) https://readable.com/blog/do-inuits-really-have-50-words-for...
You say 'pink', you mean 'pink', and if the other person wants to know which pink, they ask?
Programming languages have other ways of increasing adoption, such as offering libraries that are tightly coupled with that language. If there are interesting literature that are only available exclusively in Lojban, that might have been a good motivation to learn the language, assuming that they can compete with the heaps of existing work written in languages we already knew.
So basically haskell for regular conversation?
There are context free grammers that we can prove are unambiguous. As an example "A = xAy | ε" is unambiguous. Lojban is one of the examples of grammers we are able to prove is unambiguous.
There's dozens or hundreds of them already, living in the world now. Some of them don't even have a formalized writing system.