Re: Unambiguous languages (was: EU allumettes)

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
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