Re: Dvorak (& Lojban)

[HACKER G N <c9709244@ALINGA.NEWCASTLE.EDU.AU>]

On Fri, 24 Oct 1997, Lee Daniel Crocker (none) wrote:

> > On a different topic:  I am quite concerned by the recent discussion on
> > this list about the difference in opinion about what certain phrases
> > mean in Lojban.  Although I'm not able to follow the specifics (yet), it
> > appears that it is not at all obvious what certain phrases mean,
> > particularly when relating to abstractions (but again, I don't have a
> > clue what the specific ideas being discussed are).  All I'm
> > understanding right now that there are ideas which should be simple to
> > express, but are not in fact easy to express in Lojban.  Well I
> > currently know English, and (possibly with some difficulty) I can
> > express anything I want.  It might be awkward, but I can express it.
> > The whole point behind wanting to learn Lojban is that expressions will
> > be easier and more logical.  If the language doesn't do this, then it
> > has no advantage over English.  What's going on here?
>
> Two points: (1) The existence of disagreement about what certain
> constructs actually mean does not necessarily imply that either meaning
> was "difficult to express".

If I say utterance A, and people disagree about whether it means Z or Y,
then it might have been easy for me to express (Z or Y) as a combination,
but that's not of much help to me if I only wanted to express Z alone or Y
alone. I might have meant to express Z but not Y, for example.

>  It's very simple and obvious for me to
> say {li piso'i ni ma'a tavla fi le sidbo} "we've talked a lot about
> abstractions", and easy for most to understand it; it's just that
> others may disagree on exactly what it means

What are you claiming here? That only a minority of people are actually
confused about the meaning of this utterance? If you can 'understand' the
utterance, you should know 'what it means'.

>
> And (2) "ease of expression" is not the only, or even primary, goal
> of creating Loglan.  While we don't want it to be unreasonably hard
> to say ordinary things, a bit of difficulty in saying other things is
> OK in exchange for the ability to say them clearly and unambiguously
> in ways that natural languages cannot.

A more reasonable claim, but this goal won't really be of help to you if
you already had ways of saying what you wanted to say so that others could
understand you in your own language. Natural languages work because native
listeners are not in general confused by them, even though the reasons for
their lack of confusion are not always well understood.

Geoff