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Re: Unambiguous languages (was: EU allumettes)

From:And Rosta <a.rosta@...>
Date:Friday, May 7, 2004, 18:12
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.

Replies

Mark P. Line <mark@...>
Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>