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Re: Unambiguous languages (was: EU allumettes)

From:Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Wednesday, May 5, 2004, 17:38
On Tuesday, May 4, 2004, at 12:43 PM, John Cowan wrote:

> Ray Brown scripsit: > >>> Politically, of course. But not linguistically. I think it is >>> instructive to realize that a language that has the expressive >>> capabilities of a natlang but that is unambiguous is >>> linguistically achievable. >> >> Doesn't lojban attempt to achieve this? > > Not altogether. Lojban attempts to eliminate phonological and syntactic > sources of ambiguity: no perfect puns, no "Time flies like an arrow" > sentences.
...fruit flies like a banana :-) Yep - the Lojban website says: "Lojban is a carefully constructed _spoken_ language designed in the hope of removing a large portion of the ambiguity from human communication." I would have thought that all loglangs have similar aims.
> There are several sources of ambiguity remaining in > compositional semantics; in addition, names are ambiguous (or polysemous) > and although we aim at lexical vagueness rather than ambiguity, the > border is not always easy to determine.
Indeed, not - and humans being as we are, I think the aim to eliminate all lexical vagueness/ambiguity is not realizable.
> The price of infinite precision is infinite verbosity.
I agree. 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." Ray =============================================== http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown ray.brown@freeuk.com (home) raymond.brown@kingston-college.ac.uk (work) =============================================== "A mind which thinks at its own expense will always interfere with language." J.G. Hamann, 1760

Replies

And Rosta <a.rosta@...>
Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>