Re: Comparison of philosophical languages

I gotta join this conversation too (hurray! I'm
participating!)

Though I have given up on the whole auxlang thing (God
there's a lot of psychos on that list) I always find
the ideas that are thrown out there fascinating in
terms of their linguistic style. Some of my favorites
so far include lojban because of its innovative ideas
involving gismu and Ceqli because of its excellent
method of creating a self-segregating morphology.

One of the philosophical languages that I have found
most titilating (heehee) is aUI at
http://home.pacifier.com/~patten/
It has a very interesting system involving somewhat
universal concepts. I wish the entire meat of the
language were in public domain, though.

The problem with this language, however, as well as
almost every other philosophical language, is the
possible lack of symmetry of translation. When you
call a fir a "religious big plant" you might say "I
can see why that would work." But is it obvious that a
religious big plant is a fir? The only way to ensure a
1:1 symmetry is to translate "relgious big plant" into
a religious big plant.
Some things go beyond this, though. My big problem
with lojban's system of logic is the fact that
Bertrand Russel's proposal of using symbolic logic to
express linguistic characteristics such as noun, verb,
adjective, etc. But when a person defines the first
sentence of my message as
"too(gotta(join(I,conversation))).happiness" it
becomes extremely difficult to retranslate it into my
additional meaning without a lot of extra information.

Unless languages like aUI and Ygyde claim to be
nothing more than what the letters are, symmetry is
impossible in a philosophical language and therefore
unwieldy.

-Sam

"I'm not saying it's impossible to make a good
philosophical language, I'm just saying that the
people who try should be shot for wasting paper."

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