Re: Unambiguous languages (was: EU allumettes)

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...


-- Mark

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