Re: Unambiguous languages (was: EU allumettes)

Mark Line:
> And Rosta said:
> > Ray:
> >
> >> But if And is interested in highly disambiguated communication,
> >> then Classical Yiklamu's claims should surely be examined:
> >>
> >> "Classical Yiklamu is an artificially constructed language. Its purpose
> >> is
> >> to enable interested users to explore the possibilities of  highly
> >> disambiguated verbal communication."
> >
> > I may have mixed CY up with another conlang in my memory, but my
> > recollection is that it adopts Word Net as the inventory of its
> > word senses. By so doing, it gets rid of ambiguity arising from
> > polysemy. My feeling is that the most egregious and problematical
> > ambiguities are syntagmatic ('logical') ones so I would tend to
> > look more towards the likes of Lojban than CY. But that is not
> > to say that CY does not deliver on its claims.
>
> My intention with CY morphosyntax was to give up ambiguity in favor of
> vagueness, as it were -- that's one of the reasons why there are so few
> possible syntactic constructions. Anything that is not specified lexically
> or morphosyntactically is left vague in the semantic interpretation, *by
> definition*. (Natlangs don't have that option, of course, and neither do
> conlangs that attempt to map sentence meanings onto something like FOPC --
> the ambiguity is already there and can't be defined away.)
>
> But if I've missed the mark (no pun intended), I'd love for somebody to
> demonstrate an ambiguous sentence in CY. That way, Ancient (Vulgar)
> Yiklamu can evolve to do an even better job of supporting disambiguated
> discourse...
What you describe matches my recollections. The CY design is very
coherent & conceptually spare, but since it is intrinsically
incapable of expressing any distiction of meaning that cannot be
expressed lexically or morphosyntactically, it would *for me* not
be a candidate for the holy grail of engelangs... A random example
of a distinction hard to capture lexically:

"Three men longed to fabricate idols in honour of two goddesses"
Reading 1. 3 men, 2 goddesses.
Reading 2. 3 men, 2-6 goddesses.
Reading 3. 2 goddesses, 3-6 men.

--And.

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