[HN Gopher] Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity ...
___________________________________________________________________
Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from
communication
Author : lordylord
Score : 95 points
Date : 2023-05-20 05:16 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mw.lojban.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (mw.lojban.org)
| tagyro wrote:
| I vaguely remember a TNG* episode in which humans encounter an
| alien race that found our language too ...inaccurate, and spent a
| lot of time going over each word and sentence, to precisely
| define its meaning.
|
| * Was it TNG or am I dreaming?
|
| *edit: Thank you everyone, but it wasn't "Darmok". The humans and
| the aliens were working, for a long time, on a treaty of sorts
| because the human language was so confusing and ambiguous and
| they had to go over every small details, over and over ... Need
| to re-watch TNG
| _Microft wrote:
| Was it the episode in which the Federation needed more time to
| evacuate a colony and the other party refused because the
| treaty left no room to interpret it like that?
|
| If I remember correctly, the crew found a loophole using a rule
| that allowed them to ask for arbitration - they asked for an
| arbiter from a species that was currently in rather long
| hibernation.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| The one with the Sheliak?
|
| https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Ensigns_of_Command_...
|
| https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Sheliak
| Izkata wrote:
| I'm not them, but this is it. Their government is called the
| Sheliak Corporate, and Picard finds in the overly long treaty
| a clause about resolving disputes needing a third party - and
| names a species currently in hibernation. So they give in and
| let him have the much shorter time he's being asking for, for
| an evacuation.
| numpad0 wrote:
| "Darmok" is Internet favorite, about a species which language
| is exclusively in analogy that the translator could not be set
| up, and they decide to kidnap Picard to establish vocabulary
| over a campfire.
|
| There were couple episodes in Voyager in which aliens deem
| humans interesting but lesser, and tries to experiment or study
| on crews. One that I remember ended up in a ship self
| destruction, in another the doctor leaving his copy. As to why
| they didn't simply ask Borg for a zipped archive, I don't know.
|
| The Dominion commanders throughout DS9 must have made similar
| remarks, and so should Cardassians have. Q would outright say
| so in spite, corrupted Data might. Maybe combination of those?
| Or maybe I'm just a suboptimal Trekkie :p
| tagyro wrote:
| You are a great Trekkie, I must have been dreaming
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I believe I've seen every TNG episode at least once, and that's
| not ringing any bells. Maybe it was an original series episode?
| Despite my best efforts, I haven't been able to make it through
| more than one or two episodes of the original.
| pwnmonkey wrote:
| Shaka, when the walls fell?
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I recall that episode, but I'm not sure that's what they were
| referencing.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| XKCD on Lojban:
|
| https://xkcd.com/191/
| zharknado wrote:
| Well put. The socio-technical system gets so much neater if you
| take all the socio bits out of it.
| Decabytes wrote:
| I wonder if LLM entirely in lobjan would require less text to
| train to be just as good as the models we have today due to its
| higher clarity in expression.
|
| I also feel the same way about Esperanto due to its high
| regularity in syntax.
|
| Part of me also wonders if an ai model could be optimized by
| training it on a language specifically invented to be both easy
| for the ai to understand and the human to communicate in. Maybe
| the language was made up of lots of 4 letter words bringing the
| number of words to tokens closer to 1:1, or injecting more
| context per word so sentences could be shorter and use less
| tokens
| ftxbro wrote:
| you should check TinyStories if you didn't know of it already
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.07759
| adastra22 wrote:
| I like the idea of Lojban. I hate the implementation. It's
| basically spoken math notation for predicate logic, which falls
| flat well short of the goal. There are much better logical
| frameworks that have been developed for computational semantics
| (e.g. Davidsonian event semantics). Lojban's formalism was out of
| date already when it was proposed as Loglan half a century ago.
|
| If there is anyone out there who likes the idea of Lojban but
| want something more practical and with a firmer foundation to
| boot, contact me. I've got ideas and I'd love to find some people
| to work on this with.
| bradrn wrote:
| I'd be interested in hearing more about this. Don't know much
| about formal semantics (and in fact am somewhat skeptical of
| the whole field), but I do have a background in language
| construction, and would say I have a fairly good knowledge of
| linguistics more generally.
| adastra22 wrote:
| My email is in my profile.
|
| Formal semantics is a broad field full of some very
| interesting and practical theories, and a lot of quackery. I
| don't blame you for being skeptical. Specifically though I
| think that Lucas Champollion has done a great job of marrying
| Davidsonian event semantics with more modern work on
| qualifiers and counterfactuals that finally creates--I
| believe--an universal framework for capturing the full
| meaning of any speech utterance:
|
| https://champollion.hosting.nyu.edu
|
| If I am correct in this assessment, then the next logical
| step from a conlang/auxlang perspective is: can we build a
| direct, unambiguous spoken grammar for this universal
| semantics framework? If so, then we will have achieved what
| Lojban failed to even attempt: unambiguous meaning.
| bradrn wrote:
| > My email is in my profile.
|
| OK, I'll email you if you want to continue this discussion
| elsewhere.
|
| > https://champollion.hosting.nyu.edu
|
| Looks interesting... where should I start reading?
|
| > If I am correct in this assessment, then the next logical
| step from a conlang/auxlang perspective is: can we build a
| direct, unambiguous spoken grammar for this universal
| semantics framework? If so, then we will have achieved what
| Lojban failed to even attempt: unambiguous meaning.
|
| Personally, I'm not sure if 'unambiguous meaning' is
| possible or even desirable. Even if formal semantics allows
| us to achieve complete unambiguity when it comes to
| grammatical categories (quantifiers, temporal and spatial
| setting, etc.), I think it would be exceedingly difficult
| to make every single lexeme completely unambiguous. And
| even if this were achieved, I'm not sure if such a language
| would even be usable by humans. Still, it would be an
| interesting experiment!
| adastra22 wrote:
| Oh I'm happy to continue this conversation here, although
| it's late where I am and I'll be going to bed soon, and
| HN threads are ephemeral. Feel free to email me if you'd
| like to actually collaborate on this.
|
| > Looks interesting... where should I start reading?
|
| IIRC he did some graduate summer schools that were
| recorded online and have attached lecture notes. Those
| plus the referenced papers would be a good place to
| start. The one in particular that I'm thinking of is, I
| believe, the Summer 2014 topic of "Integrating Montague
| Semantics and Event Semantics." That marriage of
| Davidsonian and Montague semantics into a single
| framework is, I believe, a universal theory of semantics.
| [It should be noted that he makes no such grandiose
| claims.]
|
| > Personally, I'm not sure if 'unambiguous meaning' is
| possible or even desirable
|
| By 'unambiguous meaning' I mean something more specific
| than the words alone imply. [I am aware of the irony.]
|
| In computational semantics, the goal is to transform a
| parsing of a sentence into a logical statement (or in the
| case of a question, a query) about the world. For
| example, the sentence "every dog barks" would be
| translated into a logical statement of the form "for
| every dog there exists at least one barking event with
| that dog as the acting subject." Or rather a mathematical
| statement to that effect that I don't know how to render
| on HN.
|
| But unfortunately in natural language even when a
| language is correctly parsed in terms of syntax--which is
| all Lojban seeks to accomplish--there are still many
| different possible semantic implications. For example,
| the sentence "Spot didn't bark" could mean
|
| 1. There is no event in which Spot has ever barked, or 2.
| In the case of a specific event, Spot did not bark.
|
| English doesn't differentiate without clarification, e.g.
| "Spot never barks" or "Spot didn't bark that time."
| Lojban has universal and existential quantifiers, but
| their use is not mandated.
|
| When I say I want unambiguous meaning, I mean something
| very specific: monoparsing of sentences to logical
| statements/semantic formalisms. There ought to be a one-
| to-one mapping between sentences in the language, and
| logical sentences in this universal formalism. The claims
| of those sentences could be as broad or narrow as
| desired, but there shouldn't be any ambiguity about
| _what_ is being claimed.
| schoen wrote:
| > But unfortunately in natural language even when a
| language is correctly parsed in terms of syntax--which is
| all Lojban seeks to accomplish--there are still many
| different possible semantic implications. For example,
| the sentence "Spot didn't bark" could mean
|
| > 1. There is no event in which Spot has ever barked, or
| 2. In the case of a specific event, Spot did not bark.
|
| Or maybe even a third case:
|
| 3. There exists an event in which Spot did not bark.
|
| English pragmatic usage would make this interpretation
| rare, but you could still imagine a case in which it was
| valid.
|
| For example, suppose that Spot normally barks 100% of the
| time (and never sleeps?).
|
| Then there is a fortunate day in which Spot only barked
| 70% of the time, and was quiet 30% of the time.
|
| Someone who witnessed this might say "Spot didn't bark
| [today]!" to emphasize the unusual event, even though
| Spot did bark the majority of the time on that day.
|
| I just mean to distinguish this from your second case
| because I think in the second case the "specific event"
| is possibly already one which is known to the listener or
| already under discussion.
| adastra22 wrote:
| My intended reading of (2) is the same as your (3), but
| that just goes to show how ill suited English is for
| making these sorts of exact inferences.
| bradrn wrote:
| > Feel free to email me if you'd like to actually
| collaborate on this.
|
| Emailed, though I'm not sure how much time I'd actually
| have available to collaborate.
|
| > The one in particular that I'm thinking of is, I
| believe, the Summer 2014 topic of "Integrating Montague
| Semantics and Event Semantics."
|
| I'll have a look at it, thanks!
|
| > When I say I want unambiguous meaning, I mean something
| very specific: monoparsing of sentences to logical
| statements/semantic formalisms. There ought to be a one-
| to-one mapping between sentences in the language, and
| logical sentences in this universal formalism. The claims
| of those sentences could be as broad or narrow as
| desired, but there shouldn't be any ambiguity about what
| is being claimed.
|
| OK, this makes far more sense. I still maintain there
| will be a lot of ambiguity, purely because the individual
| words themselves are ambiguous, but it's an interesting
| goal nonetheless.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Well I'm working two jobs and beginning the process of
| fundraising a new startup, all while parenting two kids.
| I'll be lucky to have any time myself ;) But it's good to
| keep in contact with like-minded individuals, in case the
| opportunity arises to get some work done on it.
|
| > OK, this makes far more sense. I still maintain there
| will be a lot of ambiguity, purely because the individual
| words themselves are ambiguous, but it's an interesting
| goal nonetheless.
|
| I think we are in agreement. There are two definitions of
| ambiguity in play here. There is logical ambiguity, which
| I want to eliminate, in which a sentence can be parsed in
| multiple, contradictory ways. And then there is ambiguity
| due to imprecision, in which words have broad meaning and
| without context or clarification a given sentence parsed
| to a single logical statement can nevertheless have
| multiple distinct interpretations. That's ok.
| bradrn wrote:
| > I think we are in agreement. There are two definitions
| of ambiguity in play here. There is logical ambiguity,
| which I want to eliminate, in which a sentence can be
| parsed in multiple, contradictory ways. And then there is
| ambiguity due to imprecision, in which words have broad
| meaning and without context or clarification a given
| sentence parsed to a single logical statement can
| nevertheless have multiple distinct interpretations.
| That's ok.
|
| Yeah, I can agree with all of this. (Although Anna
| Wierzbicka's work on the 'Natural Semantic Language' is
| an attempt to control the latter sort of ambiguity... you
| might find it quite interesting, actually.)
| adastra22 wrote:
| Thanks, I'll check it out.
| CuriousSkeptic wrote:
| > for every dog there exists at least one barking event
| with that dog as the acting subject
|
| Just to wrap my head around your definition of universal
| and unambiguous here. If the language cant nail down the
| definition of dog to something all parties agree on,
| would the claim still be unambigous?
| adastra22 wrote:
| Yes, as explained in my other comment down thread. All
| parties would agree on the logical claim being made "for-
| each dog, exists event { dog did bark }". There could be
| multiple interpretations of this claim using alternative
| or stretched definitions of the words "dog" or "bark,"
| but the logical structure would be unambiguous.
| Beltiras wrote:
| I wonder if you could get the intended result for any language
| with a simple ruleset. You don't need a _language_ to reduce
| /eliminate miscommunications, you need intent and
| understanding.
| msla wrote:
| Yes, you could, because any natural language can be used to
| teach mathematics. Lojban is, like any notation, a
| convenience for people who understand the concepts, but the
| concepts can be expressed in a natural language just as
| precisely, albeit less concisely.
|
| In fact, as Florian Cajori stated in his book "A History of
| Mathematical Notations", the rise of mathematical notation
| was opposed by people who preferred the older, natural
| language style of doing mathematics, what Cajori termed the
| "struggle between symbolists and rhetoricians."
|
| So, yes, logic is mathematics, and humans did mathematics in
| natural language for a very long time before we invented the
| conlang of mathematical notation. Moving more of the ideas
| into what is, ultimately, a more expressive notation is not a
| fundamental shift.
| jpk wrote:
| This is kinda what we call "legalese". It's a sort of
| formalized subset of English (or whatever language) that
| leans on standardized turns of phrase, it tends to set up
| definitions for terms that are then used throughout a
| document, etc. All in order to reduce misunderstanding and
| (hopefully) be easy to interpret in the event of a dispute.
|
| However, we have whole judicial systems that spend a non-
| trivial fraction of their time interpreting legal verbiage.
| So clearly it falls short at least some of the time,
| otherwise courts could be, in part, automated away. Maybe
| that's because it's too hard or not possible with natural
| languages? Or the legalese ruleset just isn't refined enough?
| sillymath wrote:
| I think that when law is introduced the consequences are
| not clear so the small print is used to introduce
| modifications to the rules, so the problem is about
| adapting a rule to the everyday use of it.
| hkt wrote:
| I suspect for clarity of communication we'd need to start
| with clarity of thought - the reason legalise doesn't
| eliminate ambiguity is because people aren't effectively
| omniscient, regardless of the level of their training. Add
| to that a shifting environment (new considerations etc)
| which can make previously valid documents ambiguous and you
| have a recipe for difficulties.
|
| tl;dr cognitive ambiguities and changing circumstances are
| what make this hard, not language as a medium
| nocoiner wrote:
| I agree and disagree. I do think that the purpose of
| legal documents is to take a given set of inputs and
| dictate a predictable output. But (1) sometimes ambiguity
| is deliberate (for instance, to kick the can on a
| business point and hope that it never actually manifests
| itself after the deal is signed) and (2) as you note,
| sometimes totally unexpected circumstances arise.
|
| Wouldn't any constructed/logical language (is that the
| right term?) also be susceptible to unpredictable future
| developments?
| adastra22 wrote:
| Having a better language helps. Every language has some pain
| points that are responsible for more than their fair share of
| miscommunications. Just to use English as an example,
| although this is true of most natural languages, the overuse
| of the copula "is/are" is a consistent source of mistakes
| whether accidental or purposeful. So much so that computer
| programmers learning object oriented programming have to be
| taught the difference between "is-a" vs "has-a"
| relationships.
|
| If you say "My coworker Taro is a samurai", what does that
| mean? Did he dress up as a samurai for the office costume
| party? Does he study older forms of Japanese martial arts?
| Was he descended from a noble family from the Japanese feudal
| era and have claim to an actual samurai title?
|
| There are controlled dialects of English, like E-Prime, which
| forbid the use of the copula "to be" as ungrammatical, or at
| least heavily restrict it. You can say your coworker "dressed
| as a samurai", "trains in the arts of a samurai", or "traces
| ancestral lineage from a samurai clan", but you can't say he
| "is a samurai" in E-Prime.
|
| Would this make communication more clear with fewer mistakes?
| I don't think this has been adequately studied enough to say
| for certain. But at least in certain domains like military
| speech and air traffic control we have examples of such
| enforced language simplification resulting in measurable
| decreases in miscommunications. I'm very curious to see if we
| can generalize those results to a full, general-purpose
| dialect or entirely new language.
| bradrn wrote:
| > the overuse of the copula "is/are" is a consistent source
| of mistakes whether accidental or purposeful
|
| I'm not sure I'd characterise these as 'mistakes', _per
| se_. They're just a consequence of the fact that the copula
| is multifunctional -- just like every other English word.
| In fact, you could similarly criticise almost any common
| word: 'go', 'from', 'good', 'like', 'not'...
| adastra22 wrote:
| > the copula _is_ multifunctional
|
| Exercise: try stating this without the copula.
|
| But no, "is/are" is not multifunctional in the same way
| that "from" is. If I say "she came from school" it is
| clear that we're talking about relative motion today or
| in the recent past from one nearby location to another.
| If I say "her family came from Japan" it is clear I'm
| talking about ancestry and/or a long ago emigration, but
| also spatially oriented. If I say "the party is from 3pm
| to 5pm" then I am using "from" to indicate a temporal
| rather than a spatial motion. But it still conveys the
| same basic meaning in all these cases, as the origin
| point of a motion or interval, and it is not usually the
| case that a single usage of the word could be confused
| for more than one meaning.
|
| The IS-A vs HAS-A relationship is entirely different. It
| is the difference between existential quantification
| (some aspect of this thing resembles/has an X) and
| universal quantification (the entirety of this thing is
| fully captured by the meaning of X). Rigorously analyzed
| these are very different claims. In a strongly typed
| language they couldn't be substituted for each other.
|
| To make this concrete, if I say "he is bad" then it is
| unclear whether I am saying that person is an
| intrinsically bad man, or if I am just commenting that
| the thing that he is doing right now is not morally
| justified.
|
| This may seem like splitting hairs, but that's rather the
| point. It's at the edge of what we are comfortable
| thinking about in everyday life. But how much of that is
| because the language that we use--English--doesn't have
| these distinctions built into its very foundation? If we
| were native speakers of a E-Prime, maybe this distinction
| would be obvious and trivial. And maybe, just maybe, we
| wouldn't let politicians and con men off the hook so
| easily for equivocating language.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| > If I say "she came from school" it is clear that we're
| talking about relative motion today or in the recent past
| from one nearby location to another.
|
| Unless we mean that she came from one school of
| philosophy or art to another. Or she came from the school
| long ago to move somewhere else.
|
| > If I say "her family came from Japan" it is clear I'm
| talking about ancestry and/or a long ago emigration
|
| Unless her family came from Japan as part of a cruise
| before going to Thailand. Or her family moved out of
| Japan because they were American military stationed in
| Okinawa.
|
| Getting rid of copula gets rid of only a small portion of
| the ambiguity in natural language.
| bradrn wrote:
| > Exercise: try stating this without the copula.
|
| 'The copula has many uses.'
|
| or:
|
| 'The copula can be used in many different situations.'
|
| -----
|
| Also, I think you underestimate the amount of variation
| in other words, e.g.:
|
| > If I say "she came from school" it is clear that we're
| talking about relative motion today or in the recent past
| from one nearby location to another.
|
| Not just recent past, but having any time near to the
| point of reference: 'When she came from school after the
| bomb scare...'.
|
| > If I say "her family came from Japan" it is clear I'm
| talking about ancestry and/or a long ago emigration, but
| also spatially oriented.
|
| Or they might have arrived yesterday to visit her.
|
| > If I say "the party is from 3pm to 5pm" then I am using
| "from" to indicate a temporal rather than a spatial
| motion.
|
| But only because '3pm' and '5pm' themselves have clear
| temporal reference as opposed to spatial reference. For
| an ambiguous example, if I say 'we drove from breakfast
| to lunch', that might mean we drove starting at
| breakfast-time and finishing at lunch-time, or it might
| mean we started at a location where we had breakfast and
| drove to a location where we had lunch. (To more fully
| show that the latter is a valid interpretation, consider
| 'we drove from breakfast to breakfast': it makes no sense
| if 'breakfast' is a time, but it makes sense if treated
| with the sense of 'place where we had breakfast'.)
|
| -----
|
| > The IS-A vs HAS-A relationship is entirely different.
| It is the difference between existential quantification
| (some aspect of this thing resembles/has an X) and
| universal quantification (the entirety of this thing is
| fully captured by the meaning of X).
|
| This doesn't sound quite right to me. In my view, both
| 'has' and 'is' are basically _relationships_ , rather
| than quantifiers. Consider a sentence like 'I have the
| keys': this merely states a relationship between two
| objects, rather than quantifying over any set. A sentence
| like 'The morning star is the evening star' is similar in
| this regard. It is true that a sentence like 'I have a
| key' has existential meaning -- but I suspect the
| quantification is linked to the indefinite article 'a'
| more than the verb.
|
| > To make this concrete, if I say "he is bad" then it is
| unclear whether I am saying that person is an
| intrinsically bad man, or if I am just commenting that
| the thing that he is doing right now is not morally
| justified.
|
| This ambiguity isn't limited to the copula, though. 'I
| like him' has exactly the same kind of ambiguity.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Yup. One man's "overuse" and "source of mistakes" is
| another man's way to draw attention towards a region in
| the latent^H^H^H^H^H^H idea space.
|
| This is useful and often good enough, because a) the rest
| of what's been said and situational context will help
| home in on more specific associations (and if not, one
| can always ask for clarification), and b) we often don't
| need to resolve specific ideas - "my friend is a samurai"
| may just be an invitation for the other person to reply
| "oh, fun, speaking of more ancient cultures, have you
| read about ...", and then continue jumping around big
| clusters of associations, without ever properly resolving
| any.
| cjallen88 wrote:
| You might like another language called toaq (toaq.net) which is
| a tonal logical conlang, it has probably the nicest looking
| writing system I've seen
| adastra22 wrote:
| Thanks! Yes I'm aware of Toaq. I like many aspects of it. I
| just have too much baggage from trying to learn one tonal
| language (mandarin) to try to pick up another.
| transfire wrote:
| I believe there is a variation supported by the language to use
| semantic predicates instead of argument order. But, since
| argument order is the standard approach it doesn't much matter
| -- I think this is the biggest flaw in the language.
|
| I was also a little disappointed to learn that it is
| morphologically ambiguous without proper inflection (syllabic
| emphasis).
|
| Other than that its an amazing language, as is Loglan.
|
| I only wish it sounded a bit better. It sounds a bit slavic,
| where as I find languages like Arabic and Italian much more
| pleasing to the ear.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Semantic predicates don't solve the problem. It's an
| improvement for sure, as I believe the place-structure or
| Lojban/Loglan is the single worst mistake that has ever been
| made in any conlang. But grammatically it wouldn't change
| anything. The parsed meaning of a Lojban sentence is _still_
| ambiguous. Lojban does not try to have monoparsing of
| sentences to logical statements, except in very limited
| contexts.
| gleki wrote:
| This question is partially addressed here:
| https://lojban.pw/books/learn-lojban/#why-are-verbs-
| defined-...
| syngrog66 wrote:
| I've been making a post-apoc survival adventure game lately [1],
| and as part of the world-making I've spent some time on banging
| out little slang languages and cultural terms, for the characters
| in it to use. They deal in English, mostly. But so much time has
| past, and theres been so much loss of the traditional
| institutions which "anchor" languages over the decades and
| actively help to keep them consistent, that there cant help but
| be LOTS of drift, here and there. Linguistic mutation and
| evolution -- but survival of the "most popular." Of whatever gets
| most repeated, person to person.
|
| Its also a comedy so I get to have fun playing around with the
| distinction between "Approved, Proper and Official" languages and
| words, and their nemeses: the hip, the veil-piercing, the casual,
| the quickly improvised or intentionally irreverant ones.
|
| When I was a kid I could effortlessly switch back and forth
| between the two types. Though I felt more natural and at home in
| the latter. Then as a groan-up in the white-collar workforce,
| when I was forced to do the whole hours-long, two--way highway
| commute M-F to spend yet another 8 hours in a drab cubicle, and
| had to Watch Every Single Thing I Said and Did All Day Long lest
| some random person take it out-of-context or Find It Offensive, a
| certain joy for life was... slowly beaten out of me.
|
| I've always been a fan of Lojban, on paper. But I dont see it
| having a bigger future. English is "good enough" however
| imperfect.
|
| Less is more strikes again? :-)
|
| ----
|
| (1. see my bio: Slartboz)
| fsiefken wrote:
| Ithkuil also is a constructed language with the goal of being
| completely un-ambiguous. As a bonus it uses the most phonemes of
| any language so complex messages and meanings can be communicated
| in an efficient way.
|
| http://www.ithkuil.net/
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Ithkuil/
| baby wrote:
| After learning toki pona (the simplest conlang perhaps?) I got
| attracted by Lojban due to the machine-parsable aspect of the
| conlang, but I found it really tedious and not fun to learn.
|
| I started working on a conlang with similar ideas a while back
| (emojis in the language, machine parsable) but less strict and
| nicer sounding. Never ended up with anything though :)
| adastra22 wrote:
| You might like Mini / Mini Kore.
|
| I no joke believe that the eventual end state of linguistic
| evolution is an ideographic written language with emoji as
| characters.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| That would be terrible. Ideographic written languages are
| hard to learn (you need to memorize much more to get basic
| skills) and hard to parse (tokenization is more difficult).
|
| Of course, if that means the entire world speaks the same
| language, the price would be worth it.
|
| But I doubt we will converge on anything that is difficult to
| master, since water takes the path of least resistance.
| adastra22 wrote:
| That's not actually true. When MacArthur tried to get rid
| of the use of Chinese characters in Japanese writing during
| the post-WW2 occupation, he backed off when it was
| embarrassingly pointed out that Japan had a higher literacy
| rate than the US, despite having less of an investment in
| state schools at the time. Studies have shown that it does
| not take more time or effort for a child to learn to read
| and write Chinese or Japanese (assuming those are their
| native spoken languages) than for an American student to
| learn to read/write English. It may defy what you think you
| know as common sense, but it is a replicable observation.
|
| The reason for this is that nobody except little children
| actually read by sounding out individual letters of words.
| That would be too much for the human mind to process in
| real time. You learn to read by recognizing particular
| clusters of lines on a paper or screen as having semantic
| meaning, and your brain translates that directly. The
| imlpiactoin is the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by
| istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. (Did you read that OK?)
|
| So essentially, you and a Chinese person both put in the
| same amount of effort to learn the same number of squiggly
| lines on paper as having semantic meaning, and memorizing a
| mapping of squiggles to words. It's just that in English
| the pronunciation is emphasized in the writing, whereas in
| Chinese it is mainly the meaning of the word that is
| focused on. But given that in this age most of our
| communication is through text which may never even be read
| aloud, it does make one wonder if the Chinese had the right
| idea all along.
|
| But if so, rather than use a 3000 year old writing system
| with a lot of inherited historical baggage, why not start
| afresh? Keep the same basic concept (digital pictures in
| squares representing atomistic units of meaning, aligned in
| sequential order according to a grammar), but allow the
| pictures to make full benefit of today's digital display
| and font rendering technology. The logical end result of
| this is, I believe, emoji. Or something very close to it /
| evolved from it.
|
| To get an idea of what I mean, you might want to check out
| Xu Bing's "Book from the Ground", which is a very readable
| book written in emoji, or something close to it. You can
| read about his work here:
|
| https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/emojis-comics-novel-
| futu...
| int_19h wrote:
| > it does not take more time or effort for a child to
| learn to read and write Chinese or Japanese (assuming
| those are their native spoken languages) than for an
| American student to learn to read/write English.
|
| As alphabetic orthographies go, English is almost
| uniquely horrible, though, so that's hardly surprising.
| Have they tried comparing to e.g. Spanish?
|
| And yes, when we read with a practiced eye, we do pattern
| match entire words at once. But it's much easier to get
| to that point with a simpler, composable writing system -
| and the advantage of the alphabet (or a syllabary) is
| that you can still read everything before you get there,
| just slower. And that's just the reading part - the
| advantages of a decently phonemic alphabet or syllabary
| for writing are even more blatant.
| baby wrote:
| I don't think I agree with your conclusion. Taiwan had a
| higher degree of literacy than China in spite of
| traditional characters, yet most Chinese and Taiwanese
| people seem to have a hard time remembering characters.
| Indeed in China people just use pinyin mostly now to
| type, which uses the latin alphabet.
|
| The best thing you can do today if you want quick
| adoption of a language is to use the latin alphabet.
| philwelch wrote:
| > When MacArthur tried to get rid of the use of Chinese
| characters in Japanese writing during the post-WW2
| occupation, he backed off when it was embarrassingly
| pointed out that Japan had a higher literacy rate than
| the US, despite having less of an investment in state
| schools at the time.
|
| I'm not sure this can be solely attributed to the
| difference between character sets.
|
| > The reason for this is that nobody except little
| children actually read by sounding out individual letters
| of words. That would be too much for the human mind to
| process in real time.
|
| This sounds a lot like the theory that justified getting
| rid of phonics in schools, which has been an unmitigated
| disaster. It's also not true when you consider how adult
| readers approach new words; English in particular isn't
| great at this but there's at least a hope that you'll
| know how to pronounce a word you see written down, which
| approaches certainty in other alphabetic languages. This
| is useful for cross-referencing between spoken and
| written language.
|
| > (Did you read that OK?)
|
| Most English readers can mentally correct transposed
| letters, which is yet more evidence of the resiliency of
| alphabetic writing.
|
| > But given that in this age most of our communication is
| through text which may never even be read aloud, it does
| make one wonder if the Chinese had the right idea all
| along.
|
| I very much doubt that this is true. It might be true (or
| seem true) in the weird bubble you and I live in, but
| it's not true for the majority of people.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Even Chinese speakers can usually guess the pronunciation
| of a word they'd never seen, because of how radicals
| work. English is barely better than Chinese at this.
|
| Of course there are plenty of languages far better than
| either, with almost perfect match between spoken and
| written language. Language changes constantly, after all.
| xigoi wrote:
| English is the worst possible representative of alphabet-
| based languages.
| badrabbit wrote:
| A language humans use only in non-digital medium would be
| interesting. To avoid LLMs and surveillance-capitalism from
| knowing too much about you and your ways.
| meepmorp wrote:
| > A language humans use only in non-digital medium would be
| interesting.
|
| There's dozens or hundreds of them already, living in the world
| now. Some of them don't even have a formalized writing system.
| throwawayForMe2 wrote:
| I spent some time looking at Loglan, purchased some books and
| tapes, but never really made any progress with it. A Scientific
| American article got me interested, pre-internet days so finding
| a community to converse with was not easy.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan
| FireInsight wrote:
| I take all my conlang opinions from jan Misali aka Conlang Critic
| and he tells me to love toki pona [0] instead of lojban [1].
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLn6LC1RpAo [1]
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-unefmAo9k
| euroderf wrote:
| IIRC Loglan vocabulary had a large element of Mandarin Chinese,
| and so Lojban too ?
|
| This seemed both uselessly idealistic and absurdly user-hostile.
| I would think that a conlang targeted at global appeal would be
| based on some combination of Romance languages and Germanic
| languages, perhaps an ur-version of each (like, Latin and
| Icelandic). Such a process might bring you a result where the
| vocabulary was as accessible as English while having immensely
| better-than-English spelling, grammar, morphology, etc.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| A long time ago I tried to learn Esperanto well enough to read in
| it. I quit, but I was still intrigued.
|
| Given events in the last 18 months, instead of a constructed
| language like Lojban or Esperanto I would vote for a small subset
| of English with a limited grammar and vocabulary - with tools to
| enforce both vocabulary and simplified grammar.
|
| Why the change in opinion? It turns out that English works better
| than many other languages for text embeddings and generally
| working with Large Language Models. A simplified version of
| English, perhaps called 'glish' would be easy for English
| speakers to pick up and use with good automatic writing and
| editing tools. Advantages: make it easier for AI and for casual
| English users around the world.
| Izkata wrote:
| Maybe start with the Simple English Wikipedia:
| https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
| soonix wrote:
| Looks like you think about "Basic English" which is a bit more
| formalized than Wikipedia's "Simple English" - see
| https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English (and
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English )
| progrus wrote:
| There will be inexpressible ideas in any such language, per
| Godel.
|
| In fact, this means that there is no such thing as "free speech"
| in any totally-consistent language!
| e12e wrote:
| My initial thought on seeing this was; lojban again?
|
| Then i immediately realized that the surge of LLMs/AI would
| rekindle "Bable-17"-style ideas...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel-17
| zearen wrote:
| I'm one of the few conversation Lojban speakers, and after years
| extended study, I've found the language does not meet
| expectations. When you start deeply exploring the semantics, many
| constructs are only half defined or nonsensical. Further, the
| self appointed DFL tries to preserve the language in an unusable
| state and had alienated most of the proficient speakers.
|
| There are other logical languages out there. Most of them are in
| development, and are discussed in a Discord called the "Logical
| Languages Lodge". However there is another called Toaq that is
| almost complete, it at least as complete as Lojban (its
| vocabulary is still growing, but all of the essential words are
| there, and the grammar and semantics are complete). If you wish
| to learn a logical language in 2023, that's the one I'd suggest.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| > I'm one of the few conversation Lojban speakers, and after
| years extended study
|
| Honest question...why?
| zearen wrote:
| Can you clarify your question ?
| EddieEngineers wrote:
| I didn't take it that far but asked my parents for the Lojban
| book for Christmas and did find it fun to work through.
| Sometimes it's fun to just nerd out about something totally
| different to normal :) The year after I got a lockpick
| tutorial set.
| mdaniel wrote:
| Interesting; according to
| <https://toaq.net/refgram/phonology/>: Toaq is a tonal language
| featuring both syntactic tone and lexical tone.
|
| That makes it a hard-pass from me
| Paianni wrote:
| It would seem Toaq was started by a former Lojbanist,
| interesting.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| Oh hey I'm in that discord. I'm the one with that weird highly
| domain specific loglang and occasionally obtusely adversarial
| question (aka "trolling")
| xena wrote:
| I'd have to agree, it is grammatically logical but it is not
| semantically logical. Semantical logicalness is the really hard
| part.
| ftxbro wrote:
| I tried it with gpt 3.5 but it doesn't seem to know lojban so
| well. I asked it to translate the following in to Lojban, then
| separately after deleting that history I asked it to translate
| that to English. Here's what it did:
|
| Original English: "I heard of the TinyStories research project
| that unlocked cognitive capabilities in LLMs with fewer
| parameters. I wonder if something similar would be possible with
| lojban?"
|
| Lojban round trip English: "We interpret the use of the LLM as a
| way to confuse the knowledge from TinyStories.gy, which is
| greater than that from the experimental findings. I find it
| amusing to use Lojban instead. Does the ability to confuse the
| experimental findings also mean the ability to confuse Lojban?"
| sigstoat wrote:
| hmm since there is a CFG for lojban, it'd be interesting to
| give [some LLM you can do fancy things woth] what corpus of
| lojban there is, and then use the work on constraining LLMs to
| a grammar, and see if that'd help its output.
| int_19h wrote:
| GPT-4 doesn't do well at it, either. The problem is that there
| simply isn't that much text written in Lojban, so it can't
| learn it the way it does other languages. You can see similar
| problems with other languages with a relatively small corpus,
| such as Old Norse.
| ftxbro wrote:
| Yes this must be it. I'm curious what it would look like, to
| compare more directly. Like a LLM trained only on Lojban vs.
| an LLM trained only on an equally small amount of English.
| canjobear wrote:
| How can they be sure it's unambiguous? Ambiguity of a context-
| free grammar is undecidable.
| malisper wrote:
| Ambiguity of a context-free Grammer is undecidable means there
| are _some_ context free grammers where it is impossible to
| determine if they are ambiguous or not.
|
| There are context free grammers that we can prove are
| unambiguous. As an example "A = xAy | e" is unambiguous. Lojban
| is one of the examples of grammers we are able to prove is
| unambiguous.
| 1bent wrote:
| I'd heard of it from Heinlein, but never thought it might be
| real.
| bmacho wrote:
| Why is it so hard, and why hasn't anybody done it before? The
| whole problem seems trivial to me. You need a language where
| - first you need your words to have only one meaning. You can
| even use an existing vocabulary, like English, or Esperanto.
| - then you need to be express math/logic/structured programming.
|
| That's it, now you have a language without any ambiguity. If
| there are some ambiguity in the _objects /concepts_ that you are
| referring, then use your language more to specify the object.
| omoikane wrote:
| The difficulty in languages is not in having good features, but
| getting people to use the language at all. Existing human
| languages mostly solved the adoption problem because you want
| to speak the same language as the people around you. I don't
| think Lojban has reached that critical mass yet.
|
| Programming languages have other ways of increasing adoption,
| such as offering libraries that are tightly coupled with that
| language. If there are interesting literature that are only
| available exclusively in Lojban, that might have been a good
| motivation to learn the language, assuming that they can
| compete with the heaps of existing work written in languages we
| already knew.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Why is it so hard, and why hasn 't anybody done it before?
| The whole problem seems trivial to me. You need a language
| where_
|
| > _- first you need your words to have only one meaning_
|
| There's your answer. There is no such language, there are no
| such words. It's questionable if it's even possible - to me, it
| sounds like a category error. "Words" aren't keys in a hash
| table, and "meaning" isn't a discrete thing.
|
| > _now you have a language without any ambiguity. If there are
| some ambiguity in the objects /concepts that you are referring,
| then use your language more to specify the object._
|
| Thing is, I don't think ambiguity comes from _language_.
| Concepts and categories are naturally fuzzy for us. Precision
| is a continuum.
|
| If you need to express something more precisely than your
| language allows with single word or term, you just create a new
| word and attach a long-form description to it to position and
| connect it to other words in the latent^H^H^H^H^H^H^H concept
| space. That's how we always did it, and it was never _hard_.
| bmacho wrote:
| I still don't get it. In the linguistic part the only problem
| is to make to word->object mapping unambiguous. And it is
| trivial problem. If the world is fuzzy (i don't think so)
| then is not a problem in linguistics.
|
| Yet linguists seem to aim for a language that eliminates
| ambiguity (see TFA). Where am I wrong?
| sillymath wrote:
| theoretically you can introduce new words to be more
| precise, for example eskimos have many words for snow, from
| (1) that is because they use polysynthesis: a base word is
| attached to many different suffixes which change its
| meaning. So, while in the English language we might have a
| sentence describing snow, fusional languages such as the
| Eskimo-Aleut family will have long, complex words.
|
| So, you may solve the ambiguity problem by introducing a
| huge numbers of words, that could help a LLM, but humans
| need a relatively small vocabulary tailored to everyday
| use. So the tradeoff is reducing ambiguity and not
| increasing a lot the vocabulary.
|
| (1) https://readable.com/blog/do-inuits-really-
| have-50-words-for...
| bmacho wrote:
| A more common example is the meme about women and men
| colors. Women have magenta and salmon, while men call
| both pink. This has not much to do with linguistics or
| eliminating ambiguity.
|
| You say 'pink', you mean 'pink', and if the other person
| wants to know which pink, they ask?
| turnsout wrote:
| Virtually every word has edge cases and gray areas, so
| there can be no 1:1 correlation between language and the
| world. Think of something as basic as "chair." Is a love
| seat a couch or a chair, or both? What about a bench? A
| stool? An ottoman? A small table? A tree stump? Reasonable
| people will give different answers, and some answers will
| be nonbinary ("it's very chairlike but not strictly a
| chair").
|
| Once thought is encoded in language, it's in a lossy
| symbolic domain. It's in a messy shared vector space. And
| every human decoder unpacks the embeddings differently.
| tolciho wrote:
| The bear... no, not that bear, the other bear--yes, I know
| it's a dead bear... what, you call that a corpse and not a
| bear? Okay, the new corpse of a former bear, the one that
| is right over there...
|
| When does a bear stop (or start) being a bear? The 'bear
| goo' quickly boils down to "what you believe in" and that
| (surprise!) people have different views, even if we
| restrict "bear" to only living individuals of the family
| Ursidae--is it a bear from the time of conception, or even
| before that, or maybe only at or some time after birth, or
| always, or never?
|
| Of course you could be more specific--pa
| vizyci'ojvemrojvesofyjvericparcribe, for example--but now
| it takes forever to say anything, and you'll lose some of
| the audience--"the magistrates however replied that they
| had forgotten the things which had been spoken at the
| beginning"--and you can probably still find someone for
| whom the "nearby young and dead and soviet and tree-
| climbing bear" is still a bit too fuzzy, or anyways there
| will be people who will disagree with (or ignore) whatever
| arbitrary definition of bear you've cooked up. Maybe there
| are two such bears, or they'll quibble that a corpse is
| clearly not a bear, or they'll happily modify your oh-so-
| precise definition to mean something else, if you know what
| I mean, nudge nudge wink wink say no more because The
| Algorithm plusgoods discussions about bears, and so they
| use 'bear' to talk about something else while still
| collecting all those sweet, sweet plusgoods.
|
| Also, lojban does not eliminate ambiguity, zo'e co'e be
| do'e zu'i, but we're za'o into nunribypevykreborvi'u. A
| shaved bear would be less fuzzy?
| lez wrote:
| I like this point very much: "You can be as vague or detailed as
| you like when speaking lojban. For example, specifying tense
| (past, present or future) or number (singular or plural) is
| optional when they're clear from context.".
|
| LMBTQ movement has came into my mind immediately. I think they
| would have more success by introducing a new, 'don't care about
| your sex' pronoun to the language instead of adding a third one
| that just complicates matters.
| vidarh wrote:
| They/them already exists and have centuries of use for that
| use-case. The people objecting to that are just as likely to
| object to an entirely new one.
|
| There also are already multiple "neopronouns" [1], and they are
| frequently ridiculed by those taking issue with "unexpected"
| (to them) pronoun use). This is also _not_ a new debate, with
| variants (other than singular they) being _in use_ in limited
| contexts since the late 18th century. None of the attempts have
| met more than very limited success, as you can tell from the
| fact this is still a debate.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neopronoun
| int_19h wrote:
| You'd be surprised. I've met people with preferred pronouns
| like xe who were outright offended at the use of they/them,
| because "that's not my pronoun".
| vidarh wrote:
| Different category of objections, so not really relevant to
| the point, which was about the objection to their use in
| general, not about any given person.
| xdennis wrote:
| > They/them already exists and have centuries of use for that
| use-case.
|
| This is just gaslighting. People use "they" when they talk in
| the abstract. No one said sentences like "This is Tom. _They_
| is happy. " until a few years ago.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| > LMBTQ movement has came into my mind immediately. I think
| they would have more success by introducing a new, 'don't care
| about your sex' pronoun to the language instead of adding a
| third one that just complicates matters.
|
| I thought it was more of a pro-caring thing than a pro-uncaring
| thing.
|
| Those focusing too much on the latter are really quite good at
| bumbling into insulting behavior...
| lez wrote:
| Slippery slope fallacy here. Why should I care if my online
| customer is he/she/they as long as they pay the price? Or if
| I talk about technology through the Internet? All I want is
| effective communication with no insults.
| scotty79 wrote:
| In many languages you are obligated to care whether a table
| is a he or a she.
|
| In English you are obligated to care whether it's a table
| or the table.
|
| I'm all for languages with optional caring about stuff.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Is this meant to describe how a slippery slope forms, or
| call one out?
|
| Effective communication involving other people only
| sometimes overlaps with this subjective-first,
| transactional approach, the: I care about, I talk about, or
| All I want is.
|
| (It's a great view for designing a specific type of
| community, with business-transactional perspective +
| valuing of tightening subjective logic and avoiding
| fallacy. Well, this will always result in a specific type
| of tech community with some special focus on business and
| economic factors as combined with tech.)
|
| And I guess if we effectively cherry-pick the premise, with
| straw people assuming their various positions on the stage,
| we can easily justify a more anonymizing, transactional
| view of language. "This is how I prefer to view my life,
| therefore the needed language looks like..."
|
| In this view, language doesn't need all that extra stuff.
| Keep it direct, functional, logical, and avoid fallacies
| especially.
|
| But this isn't really getting at the relating capabilities
| of language for example, like when there are bigger
| problems at hand and diverse mindsets working together to
| solve them.
|
| Instead, it ends up bringing minds into silos, as broader
| personality theory predicts. So the I, I, me, is really
| more about self-support.
|
| With this view, individuals effectively make relating all
| about the subjective-them 24/7, and about whether they are
| good/not good. They see relating with others as "we will
| each be our best and get what we each want" as if it's a
| universal creed. The one philosophy that just makes sense.
| Do others even exist?
|
| And is this actively mean? No. Perhaps a better term is
| effectively: "passively careless," to borrow a phrase from
| Sabine Hossenfelder. And even in the subjective-first view
| it still does not make for a high-quality individual, which
| is also bad news.
|
| It's unfortunate, because not only does this view raise the
| stakes on their end with no good reason, creating things
| like martyrdom issues, but it also perpetuates the
| avoidance of effective contact with others, effectively
| making "others" the persistent bete noir.
| thih9 wrote:
| It reminds me of constructing a type system to lower the chance
| of accidental ambiguity in code.
|
| So basically haskell for regular conversation?
| leke wrote:
| I tried to learn lojban back in the day. I liked the phonetics,
| vocabulary and system in general, but it seemed an impossible
| task to remember the placeholder order of every single predicate.
| Maybe not so much of a struggle for an AI though.
|
| I still believe there will be an awesome international auxiliary
| language that the world will embrace, or rather those who wish to
| communicate with everyone will embrace. It may currently exist or
| might yet need to be invented. People are making new ones all the
| time.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| The dream of an international auxiliary language is an old one,
| yet none -- of many -- have ever caught on outside of niche
| hobbyists. It's unclear to me what further advantages a conlang
| could have that would overcome the incumbency advantage of the
| dominant lingua francas. I don't think eliminating syntactic
| ambiguity is really that exciting for people in general.
| SillyUsername wrote:
| Bah now I'm going to have to give up learning other languages,
| Klingon and Esperanto, to learn this.
|
| Qapla! Mi prenos mian capelon!
| rikroots wrote:
| Honestly if you're tempted to learn one of these universal
| languages then I'd suggest going all-in on SolReSol[1]. At
| least if you get bored of speaking it, you can instead paint
| it, or play it on a trumpet.
|
| [1] - https://i.sidosi.org/resources/grammar-of-
| solresol/grammar-o...
| sowbug wrote:
| If memory serves, Attempto was recently on HN. It's another
| natural (invented) language that parses unambiguously.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempto_Controlled_English
| gleki wrote:
| I'm one of a few "fluent" speakers of Lojban. I still think that
| among similar attempts (including controlled English) Lojban is
| the best option so far.
|
| I even wrote a new course for laymen
| https://lojban.pw/books/learn-lojban/
|
| Needless to say, few people invest in learning new languages at
| all.
|
| If you are interested you may join the discord chat
|
| https://discord.gg/c8weYzf
| yosito wrote:
| I don't know if eliminating ambiguity is even possible, much less
| a key feature of the language. There's even prominent ambiguity
| on this page:
|
| > Lojban means different things to different people
| vidarh wrote:
| A lot of communication is _intentionally_ ambiguous at that. Be
| it diplomatic texts written to let both sides present a
| victory, or comedy intentionally obscuring key facts for a
| later reveal. Having the ability to be unambiguous is great,
| but human communication is full of situations where that 's not
| what we want.
| jmillikin wrote:
| The goal of Lojban is to eliminate syntactic/grammatical
| ambiguity: Time flies like an arrow, fruit
| flies like a banana.
|
| In this example, "flies" could be either a noun or verb
| depending on context. That sort of construct isn't possible in
| Lojban.
|
| Of course, it's still possible to use Lojban to express
| statements that have an ambiguous or unclear meaning.
| emsign wrote:
| Why would you want to use a language that eliminates this
| ambiguity other than in legal or academic contexts? I think
| sentences like "Fruit flies like a banana." must exist, they
| are useful in that they are stimulating the recipient's mind
| to question the senders intentions. It demands further
| inquiries and questions, which is I think a good thing. In
| some cases being vague and ambigious is the only way to ask
| further questions.
| djtango wrote:
| Ah, classic HN Saturday morning - finding myself dreaming up
| Hungarian notation in English to disambiguate grammatical
| types nTime vFlies avLike an nArrow, nFruit
| vFlies avLike a nBanana
|
| It's ugly but if we all adhere to this convention and haze
| our juniors, we'll eliminate most our problems
| emsign wrote:
| What problems? Why most? And why "our"? I find it silly to
| think that a more precise language is going to solve "most
| of our problems", it's a bold claim which I believe to be
| false. No, world problems do not vanish if we were just
| better at understanding each other, that's not how world
| problems arise.
| shagie wrote:
| On my yet to be assembled shelf of random things will be a
| bunch of books that intend to make one go o_O when they
| read titles in the background of video call.
|
| One of the books is the language guide to Ithkuil (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil ///
| https://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Ithkuil-Language-John-
| Quijada... //// https://youtu.be/x_x_PQ85_0k )
|
| This might fit some of your goals.
| blauditore wrote:
| The latter part actually refers to fruit flies (insects),
| who like bananas. Also took me a while to figure out.
| djtango wrote:
| Ah - bugs will be bugs!
| cjallen88 wrote:
| This is basically what Esperanto and Ido do, different word
| classes and in different letters.
| prerok wrote:
| avLike still has two different meanings ;)
|
| Actually, I am not sure that having different meanings of
| the same word in different contexts is really the
| problematic part causing ambiguity in conversations.
|
| For example, sarcasm is a much more difficult problem. The
| words are the same, the meaning of the sentences is the
| same but the author's intent, the meaning behind those
| sentences is opposite if they are being sarcastic or not.
| yosito wrote:
| As someone who speaks Hungarian, but never seen Hungarian
| notation outside the context of programming, I'm suddenly
| realizing that Hungarian notation is probably named after
| how the Hungarian language itself works.
|
| Words in Hungarian have specific endings that change their
| "grammatical type" (I forget the grammatical term for
| that... part of speech?)
|
| Some examples:
|
| 1. "-as/-es": Transforms a verb into a noun that denotes an
| action or a profession. For example, the verb "tanul" (to
| study) becomes "tanulas" (study or studying).
|
| 2. "-o/-o": Converts a verb into a noun that refers to a
| person who does the action. For example, "tanit" (to teach)
| becomes "tanito" (teacher).
|
| 3. "-hat/-het": Added to a verb to form a new verb
| indicating possibility or permission. For example, "olvas"
| (reads) turns into "olvas-hat" (may/can read).
|
| 4. "-tlan/-tlen": When attached to a noun, it creates an
| adjective expressing the lack of something. For example,
| "szin" (color) becomes "szintelen" (colorless).
|
| 5. "-i": Added to a noun to create an adjective indicating
| origin or belonging. For example, "Amerika" (America)
| becomes "amerikai" (American).
|
| 6. "-ol": Attached to nouns to form verbs. This is often
| used with foreign words in Hungarian, like "ghosting-ol",
| "bullying-ol", "coworking-ol".
|
| Additionally, in Hungarian these suffixes can be combined,
| so if you want to use the English noun "ghosting" as a noun
| in Hungarian, you still actually have to add the suffixes,
| so you would say "ghosting-ol-as".
| shagie wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation
|
| > The original Hungarian notation was invented by Charles
| Simonyi, a programmer who worked at Xerox PARC circa
| 1972-1981, and who later became Chief Architect at
| Microsoft. The name of the notation is a reference to
| Simonyi's nation of origin, and also, according to Andy
| Hertzfeld, because it made programs "look like they were
| written in some inscrutable foreign language". Hungarian
| people's names are "reversed" compared to most other
| European names; the family name precedes the given name.
| For example, the anglicized name "Charles Simonyi" in
| Hungarian was originally "Simonyi Karoly". In the same
| way, the type name precedes the "given name" in Hungarian
| notation. The similar Smalltalk "type last" naming style
| (e.g. aPoint and lastPoint) was common at Xerox PARC
| during Simonyi's tenure there.
|
| > Simonyi's paper on the notation referred to prefixes
| used to indicate the "type" of information being stored.
| His proposal was largely concerned with decorating
| identifier names based upon the semantic information of
| what they store (in other words, the variable's purpose).
| Simonyi's notation came to be called Apps Hungarian,
| since the convention was used in the applications
| division of Microsoft. Systems Hungarian developed later
| in the Microsoft Windows development team. Apps Hungarian
| is not entirely distinct from what became known as
| Systems Hungarian, as some of Simonyi's suggested
| prefixes contain little or no semantic information (see
| below for examples).
|
| ---
|
| Simonyi's native language may have had some impact on how
| he wrote code, but it was not "human language -> write
| code like Hungarian -> Hungarian notation".
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2007/01/01/227178/anythi
| ng-...
|
| > The resulting code was dense and hard to read.
| Simonyi's system came to be known as Hungarian notation,
| both in homage to its creator's birthplace and because it
| made programs "look like they were written in some
| inscrutable foreign language," according to programming
| pioneer Andy Hertzfeld. Hungarian is widely cursed by its
| detractors. Canadian Java expert Roedy Green has jokingly
| called it "the tactical nuclear weapon of source code
| obfuscation techniques." Mozilla programmer Alec Flett
| wrote this parody: prepBut nI vrbLike
| adjHungarian! qWhat's artThe adjBig nProblem?
| mike_hearn wrote:
| It's not. It's named that way because the guy at
| Microsoft who implemented it (Charles Simonyi) was
| Hungarian.
| [deleted]
| detrites wrote:
| > nFruit nFlies vLike a nBanana
|
| vFprTprpFprY.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Which is a bit ironic, because in the year 2023 it turns out
| that correctly parsing sentences is an easier problem to
| solve than extracting meaning from context, even when given a
| known correct parsing. Lojban solved the wrong problem.
| emsign wrote:
| Exactly. And being able to handle ambiguity as a human is
| one of our strong points. We must not cripple our mental
| capability to understand and use ambiguity in language, it
| would a loss.
| xavivives wrote:
| Ambiguity is an intrinsic quality of language. The first words
| that an infant learns are exclusively learned through ostensive
| definitions (defining by pointing). This implies that the
| meaning of those words is fundamentally different to each of
| us, as it's founded on our phenomenological experience and not
| through the dictionary. Further words are learned to combine
| previous definitions and more ostensive definition, so
| ambiguity is carried on.
|
| Lojban does not eliminate the ambiguity of the meaning of the
| words, but the ambiguity of its syntactical structure.
|
| To me, the ambiguity of language, and the impracticality to
| change the meaning of words are the fundamental issues
| preventing humans to enhance the innate cognitive abilities,
| and the root cause of most human conflicts around
| communication.
|
| Any profession and culture has its own jargon, this enables
| them to express the particular quality of their reality with
| much more accuracy than common language.
|
| So, instead of trying to build a shared language, what we can
| do is to create a personal Language for each of us. Not for the
| purpose of communication, but for the purpose of improving our
| reasoning and internal model of the world, so we can describe
| and make sense of our particular reality with much more
| accuracy.
|
| I've been dedicated to building "Interplanetary mind-map", a
| tool that supports making your language by making your meaning
| more explicit. [0]
|
| At the same time, I've been using a prototype of it, to build
| my personal Language. You can browse into each word and see my
| particular understanding of it. [1]
|
| [0] - https://github.com/interplanetarymindmap/docs
|
| [1] -
| https://xavivives.com/#?expr=[%22i12D3KooWBSEYV1cK821KKdfVTH...
| adastra22 wrote:
| Lojban could have gone further to eliminate logical
| ambiguity, allowing monoparsing from sentence to an explicit
| statement in a framework of computational semantics (e.g.
| Davidsonian event semantics). That Lojban did not was one of
| its great failings.
| kbrkbr wrote:
| I think going from the difference in environment in learning
| first words to the meaning of those words being fundamentally
| different for everyone is a non sequitur.
|
| Specifically when not defining the ambigous concept
| ,,meaning" and without sketching the assumed mechanism by
| which they are learned and turned into language.
| wirrbel wrote:
| I spent a few weeks with Lojban around 2006. imho it felt really
| dense as a language. Definitely interesting. Back then there
| wasn't as much material in Lojban as is now available.
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