Re: Simple Lojban questions

[Andrew Sieber <absieber@eos.ncsu.edu>]

Thanks to everyone for the responses I got.  I know I should sit down
and Read The Manual before I make more comments about the language, but
I still am unsure about some things.

Jorge Llambias wrote:
> You must be joking. Are you really planning to type in Lojban
> more than in English, or at least such a significant amount that
> it would affect your decision to learn the Dvorak style? Well then
> hurry up! We urgently need that level of Lojban text production.
> Our current collective typing speed must be in the order of a
> hundred words a year...
My primary reason for wanting to learn Lojban is purely the selfish
desire to think and take notes more clearly than I am able in English.
(English is the only language I currently know.)  Having other people,
family members and friends and such, who knew Lojban would be nice, but
interpersonal communication is not the primary reason I will be learning
the language.  I have read in numerous places that learning a second
language heightens one's clarity in thinking, and Lojban is a sensible
language to learn for this purpose.  Also, as a person who likes to come
up with ideas about all sorts of topics (particularly computer science)
and write them down, it would be nice to have a language superior to
English in which I can express, in writing, my thoughts.
This is why I made the comment about Dvorak keyboards; I type notes (to
myself) a lot, and when I eventually learn Lojban, I plan to use that
language instead of English simply because it is a superior language to
English.  Of course, if and when I find other people with interests
similar to my own who also know Lojban, I'll use Lojban to communicate
with them.  It would be nice to find such people.  In the meantime,
though, I still only know English, and have no choice but to use it for
all of my thinking, note taking, and communication.  I will learn Lojban
primarily to improve the former two.
Of course, if I ever produce any text that would possibly be of any
interest to anybody besides myself, I would certainly produce it in
Lojban, mostly because the notes from which I produced this "important
text" would themselves be in Lojban.
And of course while I'm learning the language I'll post my attempts at
expressing my thoughts in Lojban to this mailing list, because it is the
only place that I (currently) know has an audience that knows the
language, and thus would be able to point out the errors I made.

>> "skami pilno" can mean a user of computers, or it can mean a computer
>> that is also a user.  Why is this ambiguity allowed in a supposedly
>> unambiguous language?
> Lojban's semantics are not unambiguous, I don't see how they could be.
> What is supposedly unambiguous is its syntax, so that you can't have
> things like "time flies like an arrow" where you don't know whether "flies"
> is working as a verb or a noun, etc.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't see the difference between
something like "time flies like an arrow" or "pretty little girls
school", and the phrase "skami pilno", as far as ambiguity goes.
Whether you call it semantics or syntax doesn't make a difference; the
point is that I don't know whether I'm referring to some king of
creature called a "time fly" that enjoys the presense of an aerodynamic
object or the fact that time goes by very quickly, whether I'm referring
to the fact that the girls are pretty or the fact that the school is
pretty, or whether I'm referring to a person who uses computers or a
computer that uses some (currently unknown) object.  All three are
ambiguous constructs; two are English, one is Lojban.  The difference is
that Lojban is supposed to eliminate such ambiguity.  I don't understand
how this particular ambiguity is allowed to remain.  John Clifford
pointed out that the ambiguity can be resolved by rephrasing the phrase,
but that does nothing to resolve the issue of the ambiguity of _this
particular_ phrase, "skami pilno".

>> Also, as I understand it, "sampli" has a definite
>> meaning, unlike the ambiguous "skami pilno".  Are such lujvo always
>> unambiguous, or are they only unambiguous when they happen to be
>> specifically defined in the dictionary?
> They will be unambiguous once they've had enough usage that we can
> determine their meaning. For the time being we can say that the speaker
> intended it to have an unambiguous meaning. If it catches on, that's what
> it will end up meaning.
This is exactly the same flaw that exists in English!  The sentence
"Time flies like an arrow" is understood by "most people" (whatever that
may mean) to be an expression that time elapses very quickly, despite
the fact that the sentence can actually have several different
meanings.  It is "understood" to have that specific meaning.  If the
same situation exists in Lojban, where specific phrases or words are
ambiguous until resolved by "consensus", then Lojban suffers from the
same problems that English does!

Please note that I'm not trying to slam Lojban as being a bad language;
from what I've read of it, it is vastly superior to English.  But I'm
raising these points in hopes of getting an explanation as to why things
are the way they are.  I do plan to learn the language (and I've already
mailed an order for a copy of the printed reference grammar book), but
in the meantime I want to understand these issues.

--Andrew